I care what you think: social image concerns and the strategic revelation of past pro-social behavior
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I care what you think: social image concerns and the strategic revelation of past pro‑social behavior Ferdinand A. von Siemens1,2 Received: 7 August 2019 / Revised: 27 January 2020 / Accepted: 24 March 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract This article studies whether people want to control what information on their own past pro-social behavior is revealed to others. Participants are assigned a color that depends on their past pro-social behavior. They can spend money to manipulate the probability with which their color is revealed to another participant. The data show that participants are more likely to reveal colors with more favorable informational content. This pattern is not found in a control treatment in which colors are randomly assigned, thus revealing nothing about past pro-social behavior. Regression analysis confirms these findings, also when controlling for past pro-social behavior. These results complement the existing empirical evidence, confirming that people strategically and, therefore, consciously manipulate their social image. Keywords Social signaling · Altruism · Trustworthiness JEL Classification C91 · D03 · D83 · D82 “I was told when I get older all my fears would shrink. But now I’m insecure, and I care what people think. My name’s Blurryface, and I care what you think.” Stressed Out, Twenty One Pilots.
Very helpful comments from participants in the Grueneburgseminar and excellent research assistance from Victor Klockmann and Alicia von Schenk are gratefully acknowledged. * Ferdinand A. von Siemens [email protected]‑frankfurt.de 1
Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Goethe University Frankfurt, Theodor‑W.‑Adorno‑Platz 4, 60323 Frankfurt, Germany
2
CESifo, Poschingerstrasse 5, 82679 Munich, Germany
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1 Introduction Field and laboratory experiments suggest that people strategically manipulate and, therefore, consciously care about their social image. Social image concerns seem to influence a wide range of behaviors, such as charitable giving, workplace conduct, voting, consumption choices, financial decisions, and investments in education, see Soetevent (2005), Falk and Ichino (2006), Andreoni and Bernheim (2009), Ariely et al. (2009), Mas and Moretti (2009), and the survey by Bursztyn and Jensen (2017). However, almost all existing studies on social image concerns use the same empirical identification strategy: they argue that people care about their social image, because they change their behavior under the scrutiny of a human audience. Bursztyn and Jensen (2017) argue that changing observability might change behavior through channels other than social image concerns. These channels could be privacy concerns, social learning, externalities, and concurrent changes in the decision environment. Observability might also influence behavior by making social norms more salient, see Mazar et al. (2008), or by increasing self-awareness, see Diener and Wallbom (1976) and Falk (2017). Rather than looking at how exogenously imposed ob
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