On Peer Effects: Contagion of Pro and Anti Social Behavior in Charitable Giving and The Role of Social Identity
Social interactions and the resulting peer effects loom large in both economic and social contexts. This is particularly true for the spillover of pro and anti social behavior in explaining how such behavior and norms spread across individual people, neighborhoods, or even cultures. Although we observe the outcomes of such contagion effects, little is known about the drivers and the underlying mechanisms, especially with respect to the role of social identity with one's peers and the pro and anti sociality of behavior one is exposed to. We use a variant of a power to take dictator game to shed light on these aspects in a controlled laboratory setting. Our experiment contributes to the existing literature in two ways: first, using a novel approach of inducing social identification with one's peers in the lab, our design allows us to analyze the spillover effects of behavior under varied levels of social identity. Second, we study whether pro and anti social behavior are equally contagious. Our results suggest that anti social behavior is more contagious than pro social behavior and that the extent of social identification to one's peers particularly drives the contagion of anti social behavior. Our findings yield strong policy implications with regards to designing effective nudges and interventions to facilitate (reduce) pro (anti social behavior.