Moral opportunism as a consequence of decision making under uncertainty
通过独裁者游戏实验，研究人们在不确定性下如何根据自身规范信念最大化预期效用，导致道德机会主义行为，并发现南欧参与者存在过度惩罚现象。
When people with different normative beliefs interact, moral opportunism—or the tendency to follow the norm that brings the highest material benefit—can arise. Our conjecture is that this behavior is a consequence of expected norm-dependent utility maximization under uncertainty. Using a novel theoretical framework for studying social norms, we experimentally test this idea in the Dictator game with second-party punishment. The theory links normative beliefs and punishment strategies, which allows us to study what determines recipients’ punishment choices after they are shown normative beliefs of their dictators. We corroborate the theory and find that many recipients indeed act in accordance with the maximization of expected norm-dependent utility that has a negative flavor of moral opportunism. We also find that some of the recipients are excessive punishers: they punish a lot, but not according to their normative beliefs. Excessive punishment is exhibited by recipients from Southern Europe, but not by recipients from the rest of Western Europe.