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We investigate whether individuals self-select feedback that allows them to maintain their motivated beliefs. In our lab experiment, subjects can choose the information structure that gives them feedback regarding their rank in the IQ distribution (ego-relevant treatment) or regarding a random number (control). Although beliefs are incentivized, in...
Citations
... Complementary efforts may foster ego-motivation gains from "pulling one's team" by increasing contributions. Substitutable efforts may trigger ego-protection in settings where a justification for effort reduction is not wanting to learn that one was incompetent [12,13]. ...
We study how individuals’ effort contribution to a team production task varies depending on whether the task is ego relevant or not. We conduct an experiment to test the effect of ego-relevance when the team production depends on the team’s top- or bottom-performer. Ego-relevance is manipulated by calling the Raven IQ Test an “IQ Task” or a “Pattern Task.” We find that the effort contributed to the task is affected by ego-relevance and the impact of the team production function on effort contribution is mediated by the teammate’s expected effort contribution. Ego-relevance increases the responsiveness to the teammate’s expected effort contributions. Similarly, more responsive behavior is noticeable when the team production depends on the bottom-performer. However, we do not observe interaction-effects between ego-relevance and the team production function that affect effort contributions.
We investigate whether uninformative relative performance feedback can create biases in confidence leading it to ‘snowball’. We study elicited confidence about own performance, relative to other group members, in three stages. As subjects move across stages, we change group composition so that new groups contain either only top performers or only bottom performers, from the previous stage. Between treatments, we manipulate whether subjects know about their own past relative performance or that of currently matched group members. In a treatment where subjects receive no feedback between stages, their confidence remains calibrated and stable across the stages. When subjects receive feedback in the other two treatments, their confidence snowballs in the direction of the feedback, both when feedback is fully informative and completely uninformative of their future performance. The results suggest the possibility of confidence biases emerging and snowballing in a potentially wide range of field settings.
