We-thinking and Status

Presenter

Zhewei Song

PhD candidate

University of Michigan’s School of Information

Time and location

North Quad 4330, Wednesday (1:00-2:00) pm

Abstract

Social motivations, such as one’s status, enjoy wide recognition as critical determinants of human behavior. A key reason for studying individual and group status is to shed light on the conditions that facilitate or deter actions that enhance group payoffs at the cost of individual payoffs. In this paper, I focus on two types of status: the status that is conferred on an individual and the status conferred on the group to which an individual belongs. I extend a model based on R. Akerlof (2016) where individuals face a tradeoff between maximizing the group’s payoffs and their individual payoffs, and their willingness to maximize the group’s payoffs is positively related to the extent to which their group status is higher than their individual status. The model predicts that subjects with high (low) group status and low (high) individual status are most (least) engaged in maximizing the group’s payoffs. To test this prediction, I conduct a laboratory experiment in which individual status is assigned based on individual performance in a calculation task, and group status is determined by the overall performance of the individual group members. In the information treatment, subjects learn about both their individual and group ranks (but do not have this information in the baseline). Subjects allocate tokens such that either their own or the group’s payoff is maximized. This study can help us predict what types of people are intrinsically motivated to work for the group and what types of people are not and might need extra motivations.