We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
To save content items to your account,
please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies.
If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account.
Find out more about saving content to .
To save content items to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org
is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings
on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part
of your Kindle email address below.
Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations.
‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi.
‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Expectations-based reference dependence has been shown to be important across a variety of contexts in Psychology and Economics. Do expectations play a role in moral judgment? The higher our beliefs are relative to an outcome, do we punish more harshly? This paper reports a series of experiments investigating the hypothesis that expectations as reference points per se affect punishment. The experimental design varies the expectation the Punisher holds just before she learns what actually occurred. In tandem with the manipulation, expectations are shown to vary significantly and substantially. However, punishment does not respond to these exogenous changes in expectations. After 17 sessions, 295 Punishers, and six experimental setups, expectations are shown not to affect punishment in any systematic way.
Building on a partner-switching mechanism, we experimentally test two theories that posit different reasons why promises breed trust and cooperation. The expectation-based explanation (EBE) operates via belief-dependent guilt aversion, while the commitment-based explanation (CBE) suggests that promises offer commitment power via a (belief-independent) preference to keep one’s word. Previous research performed a similar test, which we argue should be interpreted as concerning informal agreements rather than (unilateral) promises.
This essay is in celebration of the contributions of Mario Rizzo. I argue that among contemporary economists in the Austrian School of Economics tradition it is Rizzo that advanced, more than his contemporaries, the scientific research program of rational choice as if the choosers were human beings; the dynamic subjectivism and the agony of choice and social interaction; the causal processes and the institutional dynamics that make up a complex social order; and the role of law, politics and civil society in shaping commercial life. In making this argument, I attempt to arbitrage the contributions of two essays of Rizzo’s: ‘Law Amid Flux’ and ‘The Genetic-Causal Tradition and Modern Economic Theory’.
According to the theory of guilt aversion, agents suffer a psychological cost whenever they fall short of other people’s expectations. In this paper, we suggest that there may be limits to this kind of motivation. We present evidence from an experimental dictator game showing that behavior is consistent with guilt aversion for relatively low levels of recipient expectations, roughly up to the point where the recipient expects half of the available surplus. Beyond that point the relationship between expectations and transfers becomes negative. Moreover, we examine this relationship at the individual level and establish a typology of subjects depending on how and whether they condition their behavior on recipient expectations.
It is very satisfying to teach in a classroom where students are actively participating in discussions, group projects and other activities. Learning spaces are complex – both teachers and students experience numerous pressures, wants and needs that accompany them into a classroom. For instance, both teachers and their students want to be heard, to learn, to be safe and to have positive relationships with their peers, just to name a few. However, the value and sources for satisfaction that you and they place on these needs and wants at any given time may be different from one another. You may want to get on with a brilliant geography lesson, while a sleep-deprived student may just want a bit of rest and believe the right place for it is the very same geography lesson. These possibilities remind us that your lesson is taking place in a social environment with multiple stakeholders actively reacting to each other. This is why it is very important to develop strategies that will help you manage both your and your students’ expectations in the classroom. This chapter focuses on how the use of rules and expectations lays the foundations for positive and engaging learning environments.
Tourism wildlife interactions are controversial, the debate hinging largely on the compromised welfare of the animals used. Despite this, lion cub (Panthera leo) interactions are popular, and there is a need to understand what motivates interactors to participate in the activity, their perceptions and expectations. We surveyed the attitudes of 300 visitors to three lion cub interaction facilities in South Africa. Whilst 38% of interactors were aware of the controversy around lion cub interactions, 69% desired the experience regardless. It is widely assumed that lion cub interaction opportunities are big attractions, yet 74% of respondents said that they would still have visited if lion cub interactions were not offered. Whilst 84% of interactors felt that their expectations were met, 61% said that the interaction had no impact on them. Several of those interviewed interacted with multiple species, and 34% determined that their favourite engagement was with animals that interacted back voluntarily. Most of those interviewed chose the interaction for their children (69%). Whilst 58% felt the experience was educational, only 2% of these had learnt about the plight of lions in the wild. When asked to reflect on the welfare of the lion cubs they had interacted with, ‘Freedom from discomfort’ was seen as the most important factor, as well as ‘Freedom to express natural behaviour’. Interactions were viewed with a variety of emotions and generated a range of beliefs. We conclude that the findings can be used by facilities to better prepare visitors for the experience, ensuring that interaction animals are better able to serve in their role as ambassador representatives.
This paper evaluates (i) the transmission of global uncertainty shocks to the expectations of professionals and disagreement among them and (ii) the relevance of policy choices in open economies in the context of the impossible trinity. Relying on a large set of survey data covering a wide range of expected macroeconomic outcomes for 33 countries, we establish evidence for an expectation channel of global uncertainty shocks. Global uncertainty exerts significant and adverse effects on expectations over domestic macroeconomic outcomes across the board and also frequently spills over to disagreement over these outcomes, increasing domestic uncertainty. Finally, we identify nonlinear relationships between the policy choices in an open economy and the transmission of uncertainty shocks. Policy choices affect the expected downswing in GDP in the aftermath of uncertainty shocks, the expected response of monetary policy, and the exchange rate and disagreement over future macroeconomic outcomes.
This paper distinguishes news about short-lived events from news about changes in longer term prospects using surveys of expectations. Employing a multivariate GARCH-in-Mean model for the US, the paper illustrates how the different types of news influence business cycle dynamics. The influence of transitory output shocks can be relatively large on impact but gradually diminishes over two to three years. Permanent shocks drive the business cycle, generating immediate stock price reactions and gradually building output effects, although they have more immediate output effects during recessions through the uncertainties they create. Markedly different macroeconomic dynamics are found if these explicitly identified types of news or uncertainty feedbacks are omitted from the analysis.
This chapter lays the necessary conceptual foundation for the book’s proposed trust-based framework. It draws on theoretical and empirical scholarship on trust to offer a conceptualisation of trust in the social rights context. It first envisages trust as relational, meaning that trust may only arise in a relationship that contains three elements: control, discretion/uncertainty and vulnerability (a ‘trust relationship’). Secondly, it defines trust in a trust relationship as a set of three expectations held by a truster about a trustee: an expectation that the trustee will exercise goodwill towards the truster (‘expectation of goodwill’); an expectation that the trustee will exercise competence towards the truster (‘expectation of competence’); and an expectation that the trustee will fulfil her fiduciary responsibility (if any) to the truster (‘expectation of fiduciary responsibility’). The chapter then applies this conceptualisation to the relationship between citizens and the elected branches of government with respect to social rights (the ‘citizen-government relationship’), characterising it as a trust relationship and defining trust in it.
Is it possible to exploit cognitive biases so that a non-professional taster prefers one wine to several other absolutely identical wines? To address this question, three complementary experiments were carried out. Each time, five wines were tasted blind in a tasting laboratory by 24 to 34 tasters. Converging evidence from the experiments shows that participants were not capable of identifying that some of the wines they were tasting were absolutely identical. Moreover, the results show that by providing information about the wines’ ratings, prices, or reputation, tasters’ expectations can be modified, and, as a result, their evaluations of the wines can be altered. Specifically, we show that it is possible to modify the ranking between different wines and to get tasters to prefer a wine over other absolutely identical wines. Finally, a surprising finding was that experienced tasters express stronger opinions and adapt their evaluations more strongly after being given manipulative information on the wines they taste.
The impact of employment protection legislation has been thoroughly analyzed in varied contexts. Most studies highlight the potential harm of the legislation on labor outcomes, although evidence remains inconclusive. However, the literature has focused primarily on ex post impacts, analyzing the regulation’s effect after implementation. This article departs from that analysis to focus on anticipated or ex ante effects of labor regulation. More specifically, we study the role of firms’ expectations in future stricter labor legislation related to employment and income in Peru’s formal and informal labor market. To account for expectations, we used the number of news items related to the approval of a proposed law—the General Labor Law—to increase labor rigidities in Lima’s most important business newspaper. Using the Peruvian labor survey, we find a negative but decreasing relationship between firms’ expectations of a future stricter labor market and employment and average income. We also collect evidence that bigger news items and ones closer to the front page have a negative relationship with formal employment and income.
In natural conversation, multiple factors likely impact the social force of a sociolinguistic variant, yet researchers have tended to examine individual factors in isolation. This paper considers two underexamined factors together—the role of a variable's internal constraints and the role of stylistically congruent surrounding speech—to understand their combined influence on how a single variable's realization is socially interpreted. Focusing on English variable (ING), two accent rating experiments used stimuli varying the grammatical category of (ING) words and varying the stylistic congruence (natural sentences versus spliced stimuli) between (ING) realization and sentence frames. Results indicate that listeners showed sensitivity to (ING)'s internal constraints but only when the congruence between (ING)'s realization and other cues was not disrupted by using spliced stimuli. These findings suggest that internal constraints and stylistic congruence play a role in social signaling, and have methodological implications for the use of splicing.
Recent research suggests that people discount or neglect expectations of reciprocity in trust dilemmas. We examine the underlying processes and boundary conditions of this effect, finding that expectations have stronger effects on trust when they are made accessible and when they are provided as objective probabilities (Study 1). Objective expectations have stronger effects when they are based on precise, rather than ambiguous, probabilities (Study 2). We also find that trust decisions differ from individual risk-taking decisions: people are more willing to trust, and expectations have stronger effects on trusting behavior (Study 2). These results show that the availability and ambiguity of expectations shape trust decisions, and that people differentially weight expectations in dilemmas of trust and individual risk-taking.
Evidence, anecdotal and scientific, suggests that people treat (or are affected by) products of prestigious sources differently than those of less prestigious, or of anonymous, sources. The “products” which are the focus of the present study are poems, and the “sources” are the poets. We explore the manner in which the poet’s name affects the experience of reading a poem. Study 1 establishes the effect we wish to address: a poet’s reputation enhances the evaluation of a poem. Study 2 asks whether it is only the reported evaluation of the poem that is enhanced by the poet’s name (as was the case for The Emperor’s New Clothes) or the enhancement is genuine and unaware. Finding for the latter, Study 3 explores whether the poet’s name changes the reader’s experience of it, so that in a sense one is reading a “different” poem. We conclude that it is not so much that the attributed poem really differs from the unattributed poem, as that it is just ineffably better. The name of a highly regarded poet seems to prime quality, and the poem becomes somehow better. This is a more subtle bias than the deliberate one rejected in Study 2, but it is a bias nonetheless. Ethical implications of this kind of effect are discussed.
A standard way to elicit expectations asks for the percentage chance an event will occur. Previous research demonstrates noise in reported percentages. The current research models a bias; a five percentage point change in reported probabilities implies a larger change in beliefs at certain points in the probability distribution. One contribution of my model is that it can parse bias in beliefs from biases in reports. I reconsider age and gender differences in Subjective Survival Probabilities (SSPs). These are generally interpreted as differences in survival beliefs, e.g., that males are more optimistic than females and older respondents are more optimistic than younger respondents. These demographic differences (in the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing) can be entirely explained by reporting bias. Older respondents are no more optimistic than younger respondents and males are no more optimistic than females. Similarly, in forecasting, information is obscured by taking reported percentages at face value. Accounting for reporting bias thus better exploits the private information contained in reports. Relative to a face-value specification, a specification that does this delivers improved forecasts of mortality events, raising the pseudo R-squared from less than 3 percent to over 6 percent.
The present study investigates how group-cooperation heuristics boost voluntary contributions in a repeated public goods game. We manipulate two separate factors in a two-person public goods game: i) group composition (Selfish Subjects vs. Conditional Cooperators) and ii) common knowledge about group composition (Information vs. No Information). In addition, we let the subjects signal expectations of the other’s contributions in the experiment’s second phase. Common knowledge of Selfish type alone slightly dampens contributions but dramatically increases contributions when signaling of expectations is allowed. The results suggest that group-cooperation heuristics are triggered when two factors are jointly salient to the agent: (i) that there is no one to free-ride on; and (ii) that the other wants to cooperate because of (i). We highlight the potential effectiveness of group-cooperation heuristics and propose solution thinking as the schema of reasoning underlying the heuristics. The high correlation between expectations and actual contributions is compatible with the existence of default preference to satisfy others’ expectations (or to avoid disappointing them), but the stark end-game effect suggests that group-cooperation heuristics, at least among selfish players, function ultimately to benefit material self-interest rather than to just please others.
Digital identity systems are not devised for their own sake, rather they are developed by institutions as part of their pursuit of specific goals—such as economic, social, and developmental outcomes through enabling individual rights and facilitating access to basic services and entitlements. A growing number of organizations and institutions are advancing specific principles, frameworks, and “imaginaries” of what “good” digital identity looks like—yet it is often not clear how much influence they have or what their underlying worldview is to those designing, developing, and deploying these systems. This paper introduces sociopolitical configurations as a means of studying these underlying worldviews. Sociopolitical configurations combine elements from technological frames, expectations, and imaginations as well as developmental discourses to provide a basis for critically examining three key documents in this space.
Effective governance is necessary in a successful constitutional democracy. This is not to deny that a central animating force in a democracy must be respect for the human individual. But a government that is not effective and seen as such is not likely to be able to protect individual rights. It is thus a mistake to conceptualize individual rights simply as in conflict with the collective goals of a democratic government: those goals are effective governance and rights preservation, and – in a democracy – these two are connected.
The framers of the US Constitution well understood that a constitutional state must act for public-regarding purposes – to “establish Justice, ensure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty.” To the extent that it fails to move in these directions, government will lose the confidence of the people. Effective government in constitutional democracies requires effective legislatures to promote all of these purposes.
Since the 1990s sociology has rediscovered a theme already present in the discipline’s foundational theories: the salience of future perceptions for social action. This article provides an overview of “the sociology of imagined futures”, a diverse but still scattered research field explicitly engaged with expectations, aspirations and future orientations. A review of recent scholarship emphasizes how an imagined future perspective is related to a wide range of topics and allows for innovative vantage points on persisting sociological research concerns, such as inequality, social identities, agency, coordination, power or understanding innovation and change. By systematically highlighting these contributions, but also by pointing to promising lacunae and perspectives that merit further development, this article shows how a reorientation of sociological research “back to the future” seems a promising way forward.
Chapter 13 begins with a definition of story and a brief overview of past theory and research.Then story structure, master-plots, and themes are discussed, using examples from well-known literature as well as from actual discourse.Different forms and uses of stories in conversation are discussed, including retold stories and stories that express or celebrate group identity.