Poverty negates the impact of social norms on cheating (co-authored with Suparee Boonmanunt and Stephan Meier)
- Date: Nov 14, 2018
- Time: 05:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
- Speaker: Agne Kajackaite
- WZB Berlin Social Science Center
- Location: MPI
- Room: Ground Floor
Cheating such as corruption and tax evasion
are extremely prevalent in the developing world and therefore many
interventions have been undertaken to reduce cheating in these
countries. While there is some evidence that economic circumstance
correlates with cheating, the causal effect of poverty on cheating and
the effectiveness of interventions on the financially constrained remain
an open question. Here we present results from a lab-in-the-field
experiment with low-income rice farmers in Thailand (N=568), in which,
firstly, we investigate the causal effect of poverty on cheating and
secondly, test whether poverty affects the effectiveness of
interventions to reduce cheating. We show that poverty itself does not
affect willingness to cheat. However, while a standard social norm
reminder intervention reduced cheating when the population was
relatively rich (after harvest), it had no effect when the population
was poorer (before harvest). Our results inform policy makers that the
timing of interventions really matters.