Browsing by Author "Myrseth, Kristian Ove R."

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Conditional Cooperation: Evidence for the Role of Self-Control
(2010-07) Martinsson, Peter; Myrseth, Kristian Ove R.; Wollbrant, Conny
When facing the opportunity to allocate resources between oneself and others, individuals may experience a self-control conflict between urges to act selfishly and preferences to act pro-socially. We explore the domain of conditional cooperation, and we test the hypothesis that increased expectations about others’ average contribution increases own contributions to public goods more when self-control is high than when it is low. We pair a subtle framing technique with a public goods experiment. Consistent with our hypothesis, we find that conditionally cooperative behavior is stronger (i.e., less imperfect) when expectations of high contributions are accompanied by high levels of self-control.
Intuitive cooperation refuted: Commentary on Rand et al. (2012) and Rand et al. (2014)
(2015-03) Myrseth, Kristian Ove R.; Wollbrant, Conny E.; Dept. of Economics, University of Gothenburg
We show that Rand et al. (2012) and Rand et al. (2014)—who argue that cooperation is intuitive—provide an incorrect interpretation of their own data. They make the mistake of inferring intuition from relative decision times alone, without taking into account absolute decision times. We re-examine their data and find that the vast majority of their responses are slow, exceeding four seconds, even in time-pressure treatments intended to promote intuitive responses. Further, a plot of the average cooperation rates by decision time presents no clear relationship between decision time and cooperation. However, among the few decisions that were relatively fast (less than four seconds), there appears to be a positive—not negative—correlation between decision time and cooperation. We conclude that the data presented by Rand et al. (2012) and Rand et al. (2014) fail to provide evidence for the hypothesis that cooperation is intuitive. If anything, their data indicate the opposite.
Reconciling Pro-Social vs. Selfish Behavior - Evidence for the Role of Self-Control
(2010-05-10T06:49:16Z) Martinsson, Peter; Myrseth, Kristian Ove R.; Wollbrant, Conny
We test the proposition that individuals may experience a self-control conflict between short-term temptation to be selfish and better judgment to act pro-socially. Using a dictator game and a public goods game, we manipulated the likelihood that individuals identified self-control conflict, and we measured their trait ability to implement self-control strategies. Consistent with our hypothesis, we find that trait self-control exhibits a positive and significant correlation with pro-social behavior in the treatment that raises likelihood of conflict identification, but not in the treatment that reduces likelihood of conflict identification.