Dissertation abstract: Reputational benefits of altruism and altruistic punishment

Recent studies in experimental economics have shown that many people have other-regarding preferences, potentially including preferences for altruism, reciprocity, and fairness. It is useful to investigate why people possess such preferences and what functional purpose they might serve outside the laboratory, because evolutionary and social learning perspectives both predict that cooperative sentiments should only exist if they bring benefits that outweigh the costs of other-regarding behavior. Theories of costly signaling suggest that altruistic acts may function (with or without intention) as signals of unobservable qualities such as resources or cooperative intent, and altruists may benefit (possibly unintentionally) from the advertisement of such qualities. After reviewing the theories that could potentially account for the evolution of altruism (Chapter 1), I test some predictions about cooperation derived from costly signaling theory. In Chapter 2, I show that participants in experimental public goods games were more cooperative when they had cues that they could benefit from having a good reputation, and that there was apparently some competition to be the most generous group member. Furthermore, in subsequent trust games, people tended to trust high public goods contributors more than low contributors. Chapter 3 failed to find evidence that granting high status to people makes them more likely to contribute to public goods or punish free-riders, but there was suggestive evidence that physical proximity to the experimenter affected contributions and punishment. In Chapter 4, I found that people tended to trust others who were willing to incur costs to punish those who free-ride on group cooperation provided that such punishment was justified, and men were more punitive than women. In Chapter 5, I show that women find altruistic men more desirable than neutral men for long-term relationships. Together, these results suggest that humans do treat altruism as a signal of willingness to be cooperative. These findings are discussed with respect to the adaptive design of cooperative sentiments as well as the current debate over group selection. Dissertation: Department of Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontarion Currently: Post-Doc, Department of Neurobiology & Behavior, Cornell University     

Values,value types and moral reasoning of MBA students

This study uses the Schwartz Values Questionnaire and version 2 of the Defining Issues Test to investigate the values, value types (clusters of related values) and level of moral reasoning of a sample of 108 MBA students in a Canadian university. There are no statistically significant differences in the levels of moral reasoning attributed to gender. Male and female MBA students rank ‘family security’ and ‘healthy’ as their two most important values. For males, hedonism, achievement and self‐direction are the three most important value types, while for females they are benevolence, hedonism and security, respectively. There are statistically significant gender differences for the value types hedonism, achievement, stimulation and power. Overall, however, there are more similarities than differences between the male and the female students. Regression analysis indicates a statistically significant positive association between the postconventional level of moral reasoning as measured by P‐scores and the value‐type universalism. The findings provide further evidence that value types affect the postconventional level of moral reasoning.     

The demography of micro-states

There are two types of micro-states, islands and mainland ones. Except for a few islands very close to the coast, most of the insular micro-states are demographically very different from the rest of the Third World. Their death-rates are lower, their birth-rates lower, and the propensity of their populations to migrate to developed countries higher. It is argued here that these differences are based on other social and economic differences, which can be summarized by saying that such states are more Westernized. They were part of the European maritime system at a time when the West did not have the economic strength to penetrate continental areas to the same extent. On the whole they retained colonial links longer.     

Do What Consumers Say Matter? The Misalignment of Preferences with Unconstrained Ethical Intentions

Nearly all studies of consumers’ willingness to engage in ethical or socially responsible purchasing behavior is based on unconstrained survey response methods. In the present article we ask the question of how well does asking consumers the extent to which they care about a specific social or ethical issue relate to how they would behave in a more constrained environment where there is no socially acceptable response. The results of a comparison between traditional survey questions of “intention to purchase” and estimates of individuals willingness-to-pay for social attributes in products reveal that simple survey questions are too “noisy” to provide operationally meaningful information and overstate intentions to a considerable extent. Pat Auger is Associate Professor at the Melbourne Business School. Timothy M. Devinney is Professor and Professorial Research Fellow at the Australian Graduate School of Management.     

An Analysis of the Factor Structure of Jones’ Moral Intensity Construct

In 1991, Jones developed an issue-contingent model of ethical decision making in which moral intensity is posited to affect the four stages of Rest’s 1986 model (awareness, judgment, intention, and behavior). Jones claimed that moral intensity, which is “the extent of issue-related moral imperative in a situation” (p. 372), consists of six characteristics: magnitude of consequences (MC), social consensus (SC), probability of effect (PE), temporal immediacy (TI), proximity (PX), and concentration of effect (CE). This article reports the findings of two studies that analyzed the factor structure of moral intensity, operationalized by a 12-item Perceived Moral Intensity Scale (PMIS) adapted from the work of Singhapakdi et al. [1996, Journal of Business Research, 36, 245–255] and Frey [2000, Journal of Business Ethics, 26, 181–195]. The two items that were purported to measure CE were dropped due to their inability to effectively tap into the characteristic proposed by Jones. Factor analyses of the remaining 10 items supported a 3-factor structure, with the MC, PE, and TI items loading on the first factor, the PX items loading on the second factor, and the SC items loading on the third factor. These factors were labeled: Probable Magnitude of Consequences, Proximity, and Social Consensus. The authors conclude that moral intensity consists of three characteristics, rather than the six posited by Jones.     

The Effect of Moral Intensity on Ethical Judgment

Following an extensive review of the moral intensity literature, this article reports the findings of two studies (one between-subjects, the other within-subject) that examined the effect of manipulated and perceived moral intensity on ethical judgment. In the between-subjects study participants judged actions taken in manipulated high moral intensity scenarios to be more unethical than the same actions taken in manipulated low moral intensity scenarios. Findings were mixed for the effect of perceived moral intensity. Both probable magnitude of consequences (a factor consisting of magnitude of consequences, probability of effect, and temporal immediacy) and social consensus had a significant effect; proximity did not. In the within-subject study manipulated moral intensity had a significant effect on ethical judgment, but perceived moral intensity did not. Regression of ethical judgment on age, gender, major, and the three perceived moral intensity factors was significant between-subjects, but not within-subject. Ethical judgment was found to be a more robust predictor of intention than perceived moral intensity using a within-subject design. Joan M. McMahon is an Assistant Professor of Management in the Luter School of Business at Christopher Newport University, teaching courses in Organizational Behavior, Leadership, and Human Resources. She has a B.A. in Speech from the State University of New York, College at Oneonta; an M. Ed. in Early Childhood Education from James Madison University; and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Industrial/Organizational Psychology from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. Robert J. Harvey is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. He has a B.A. in Psychology and an M.A. in Experimental Psychology from the University of Missouri at Kansas City, and a Ph.D. in Industrial/Organizational Psychology from Ohio State University. Dr. Harvey has authored a number of articles in the Journal of Applied Psychology, the Journal of Personality Assessment, Personnel Psychology, and others. He is the author of the chapter on job analysis in the Handbook of Industrial and Organizational Psychology.