The Desire to Influence Others

Abstract

We introduce the give-or-destroy game that allows us to fully elicit an individual’s social preference schedule. We find that about one third of the population exhibits both pro-social and anti-social preferences that are independent of payoff comparisons with those who are affected. We call this type of preference a desire to influence others. The other two thirds of the population consist to almost equal parts of payoff maximizers and pro-socials. Furthermore, we find that full information and experimenter demand may increase the extent of pro-social preferences, but neither treatment affects the extent of anti-social preferences or the distribution of social types in the population.

Keywords: altruism, joy of destruction, other-regarding behavior, giving and destruction, kindness, fairness, spite, envy

JEL Classification: A13, C90, D31, D63, D64