Goal
The major thrust of this project is to understand when people adopt group goals and how such goals affect decision making. Since chronic strength of social goals is hard to measure, we manipulate strength in the laboratory in two ways: by instructing people to play particular roles in a rich story context or by employing a group identity manipulation, either minimal (Tajfel et al 1971), or by forming groups that complete different substantial group tasks (e.g., anagram versus sequence completion tasks).

Following the group identity (or control) manipulation, people play strategic games (e.g., commons dilemma or interdependent security or investment games). Story context of such games vary and strength of social goals is indexed by degree of cooperative choice or unrequired distribution of investment proceeds. In a series of experiments, we seek to determine the contributions of group identity, context, and regulatory focus to social goals. Furthermore, we hope to learn about factors that affect group identity strength (which can be manipulated) and about the feasibility of direct measurements of chronic social motivation.

Background
Social goals are manifest most easily in situations where a person's actions affect other people's welfare. Strategic games provide an excellent laboratory paradigm; with proper controls, social goals can be isolated and modeled effectively (Fehr Rockenbach 2003). An obvious case is Prisoners' Dilemma: if a person cares about the other player's outcomes, the actual nominal payoff matrix is very different from the nominal one.

Research Questions
How are social goals affected by group identity, context and regulatory focus?

What factors affect group identity strength?

What is the feasibility of direct measurements of chronic social motivation?

Related Projects
Following are sub-projects conducted as part of the Group ID project.

» To Cooperate or Not to Cooperate: Impact of Unrelated Collaboration on Social Dilemma

» Creating Trust in Groups

Related Material

»Society for Judgement and Decisionmaking Conference Presentation, November 2007: Constructed Choice and Discounting of Environmental Goals, David Krantz

Last Updated: February 20, 2008