Could shame and honor save cooperation?

Abstract

Shame and honor are mechanisms that expose behavior that falls outside the social norm. With recent six-player public goods experiments, we demonstrated that the threat of shame or the promise of honor led to increased cooperation. Participants were told in advance that after ten rounds two participants would be asked to come forward and write their names on the board in front of the fellow group members. In the shame treatment, the least cooperative players were exposed and wrote their names under the sentence "I donated least" while the honored participants wrote their name under "I donated most." In both the shame and honor treatments, participants contributed approximately 50% more to the public good, as compared with the control treatment in which all players retained their anonymity. Here, we also discuss how shame and honor differ from full transparency, and some of the challenges to understanding how anonymity and exposure modify behavior.