Beware Of Popular Kids Bearing Gifts: A Framed Field Experiment - Jignan Chen, Daniel Houser, Natalia Montinari, And Marco Piovesan (Interdisciplinary Center For Economic Science, George Mason University) Page 7
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. Therefore, we exclude any concern of ingroup preferences by design. Moreover,
note, of course, that “socially integrated” people may not be more popular. For example,
a person could be well-connected to many people, and yet none of those people may
consider that person as one of those with whom they would prefer to spend time. We
contribute to the existing literature by shedding light on the extent to which
popularity/status concern affects children’s pro-social behaviors in both public and
private decision contexts.
III. Hypotheses
In this section, we describe our main hypotheses.
H1: Public environments promote pro-social behavior among popular people to a
greater extent than less popular people (Main Popularity Effect), while behavior in
private decision contexts does not vary with popularity.
According to social signaling, perception dictates people’s prosociality, in that people
care about their social image and whether they are perceived as fair and pro-social, while
their behavior is driven by other people’s knowledge about what they did (or did not do)
(Andreoni & Bernheim, 2009; Charness et al., 2003; Schram & Charness, 2012). People
exhibit less prosociality if they can be unfair without appearing so to others (Dana et al.,
2007; Kagel, 1996; Larson & Capra, 2009; Levitt & List, 2007; Schram & Charness,
2012; Shaw et al., 2013). Popularity is a product of peer perception, and it is a form of
social image; thus, we hypothesize that popularity should have a positive effect on pro-
social behavior only when decisions are public information, and have no influence at all
if decisions are private. In addition, to build and maintain popularity (or social status),
one need only appear nice, altruistic, and fair in public (as opposed to private) situations.
Indeed, several studies report that people often engage in “impression management” (for
example, Barclay & Willer, 2007; De Cremer & Sedikides, 2008; Milinski et al., 2002).
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As detailed in Section IV, the children participants in our experiment were informed that they are
donating their silly bands to children from different classes.
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5!
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