Judgment and Decision Making (Oct 2009)
Exploiting moral wiggle room
Abstract
We designed an experiment to test the robustness of Dana, Weber, and Kuang's (DWK), 2007 results. DWK observed that, when participants were given a ``costless'' way --- the click of a button --- to ignore the consequences of their actions on others' payoffs, they chose to remain ignorant and fair behavior diminished. By implementing a double-blind experiment together with a design that controls for alternative explanations for the observed behavior, we confirmed DWK's findings.
