Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/238234 
Year of Publication: 
2020
Series/Report no.: 
Working Papers in Economics and Statistics No. 2020-10
Publisher: 
University of Innsbruck, Research Platform Empirical and Experimental Economics (eeecon), Innsbruck
Abstract: 
Are upper class individuals less ethical? Highly popularized research findings support this notion. This paper provides a novel test to evaluate the relationship between social status and ethical behavior. We successfully prime a large heterogeneous sample of the German population as either high or low social status. We then elicit ethical behavior in an incentivized experimental task. Thus, our data allows us to study both correlation (using demographic data) and causality (using the priming). Our study does not support the claim that higher social status individuals are less ethical, as prominently suggested by the literature. This result holds both for a respondent's true social status and for her primed subjective social status. Our findings call for a re-interpretation of the existing evidence.
Subjects: 
cheating
ethics
mind game
priming
social class
JEL: 
D63
D31
Document Type: 
Working Paper

Files in This Item:
File
Size
4.94 MB





Items in EconStor are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.