I’m in a hurry, I don't want to know!:Strategic ignorance under time pressure

Link:
Autor/in:
Erscheinungsjahr:
2022
Medientyp:
Text
Schlagworte:
  • Conflict avoidance
  • Information avoidance
  • Prosocial behavior
  • Strategic ignorance
Beschreibung:
  • Information avoidance is common when privately beneficial choices have uncertain and potentially adverse effects on others. A dominant theory holds that such "strategic ignorance" allows decision makers to circumvent inner moral conflict while acting self-servingly. In extension of this theory, we hypothesize that time pressure elevates the prevalence of strategic ignorance. We conduct a laboratory experiment with resolvable payoff uncertainty to test this hypothesis. We find that time pressure indeed significantly increases the incidence of information avoidance. As a result, self-serving choices are more common than in a baseline without time pressure. We empirically explore several potential interpretations of this main finding. First, in a control condition, in which payoffs are fully transparent, time pressure has no direct effect on self-serving behavior. This speaks against a general tendency to act more self-servingly or fairly under time pressure. Second, a follow-up study shows that information avoidance under time pressure is attributable to conflict avoidance, rather than providing decision makers with a convenient excuse for not becoming informed. We discuss these observations in the context of a recent body of literature on the cognitive underpinnings of prosocial behavior and argue that they have significant implications for information-based approaches to public policy.
Lizenz:
  • info:eu-repo/semantics/closedAccess
Quellsystem:
Forschungsinformationssystem der UHH

Interne Metadaten
Quelldatensatz
oai:www.edit.fis.uni-hamburg.de:publications/d480f51c-24b2-4138-993c-8fcb73d4b11d