City Research Online

Abstract

This paper provides evidence showing that people are more prone to engage in nasty behavior, malevolently causing financial harm to other people at own costs, when they make decisions in a group context rather than when making choices individually on their own. We establish this behavioral regularity in a series of large-scale experiments among university students, adolescents, and nationally representative samples of adults—more than ten thousand subjects in total. We test several potential mechanisms, and the results suggest that individual nasty inclinations are systematically more likely to affect behavior when decisions are made under the “cover” of a group, that is, in a group decision-context that creates a perception of diffused responsibility.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons CC BY license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Subjects:	B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General)
Departments:	School of Policy & Global Affairs School of Policy & Global Affairs > Economics
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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