09:30 - 11:00
Parallel track
Room: UCK, Room 115
Shooting the messenger. Supply and demand of ignorance in prosocial decisions.
Ivan Soraperra 1, Shaul Shalvi 1, Joël van der Weele 1, Marie Claire Villeval 2
1 CREED - University of Amsterdam, AMSTERDAM
2 GATE Lyon St. Etienne - CNRS, Lyon

Willful ignorance is a strategy aimed at avoiding accountability and at reducing moral costs of dishonest, inappropriate, or immoral actions. Most of the literature focuses on the demand side of willful ignorance and does not consider that, in many cases, ignorance comes from the decision of a different agent, e.g., advisor, newspapers’ editor, etc., to share or communicate information. With this project we experimentally study whether and how informed agents, i.e., advisors, decide to suppress information about potentially negative consequences of decision makers’ actions for non-strategic reasons—when advisors are not in competition—and for strategic reasons—when they advisors compete to advise. The results of the experiment show that: (i) advisors are willing to suppress information in the absence of competition and suppression depends on their personal preferences to be informed; (ii) Suppression of news with and without competition are not statistically different.


Reference:
Fr-Motivated beliefs and motivated reasoning-4
Session:
Motivated beliefs and motivated reasoning
Presenter/s:
Ivan Soraperra
Room:
UCK, Room 115
Date:
Friday, 3 May
Time:
09:30 - 11:00
Session times:
09:30 - 11:00