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  • About
  • The Global ETD Search service is a free service for researchers to find electronic theses and dissertations. This service is provided by the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations.
    Our metadata is collected from universities around the world. If you manage a university/consortium/country archive and want to be added, details can be found on the NDLTD website.
21

Dynamika vnitrostranického teroru na lokální úrovni KSČ v době pozdního stalinismu / Dynamics of Terror on the Local Level of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in Late Stalinism

Lóži, Marián January 2014 (has links)
Diploma thesis is aspiring to cover and interpret processes, which in the period of culminating Stalinism determined course and results of intraparty terror in the local - mainly regional and departmental - organizations of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. It is thoroughly addressing the state of affairs on the lower levels of the party organism. It is monitoring not only techniques of functioning or on the contrary dysfunction of hierarchic machinery, but also various interests of given individuals or even whole groups emerging in the party. Under the label of intraparty terror it then comprises dictatorial practice of leading officials which established itself on the local level as well as fight against it headed be lower functionaries and active party members. Both actualities are not interpreted from the outside by some general causes, but as autonomous phenomenons with their own preconditions and dynamics, more or less different in every region. Resulting scenarios consequently demonstrated considerable variety. Finally great scope is dedicated to the Stalinist ideology, which is not percepted as a constricted doctrine creating loyal subjects, but as a complex discourse providing party members with language in which they can act and pursue their goals. It endowed necessary instruments...
22

Hispanoamerická literární tradice v díle Jorgeho Luise Borgese / Hispanoamerican Literary Tradition as Reflected in the Jorge Luis Borges' Works

Krátká, Tereza January 2016 (has links)
The aim of the work is to present Argentinian literary tradition as reflected in the Jorge Luis Borges' essays and collections of poems from his early creative period (twentieth and thirtieth of 20th century). The corpus of the analyzed works is created by three collections of poems - Passion for Buenos Aires, Moon across the Way, San Martin Copybook and three books of essays - Evaristo Carriego, The Size of My Hope and The language of the Argentines. At the beginning, the text is focused on Argentinian (respectively on Hispanoamerican) cultural context at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Then, the text continues by analysis of six Borges' books mentioned above reflecting five most important Argentinian motives - pampa, gaucho, compadrito, Buenos Aires and its suburbs and dictator. The author notices different attitudes to Argentinian topic and concludes that Argentina symbolizes very important theme, which is influenced also by Borges' predecessors (e. g. Sarmiento, Hernández or Lugones). Key words: Jorge Luis Borges, Argentinian literary tradition, cultural identity, textual analyse, Buenos Aires, suburb, pampa, compadrito, dictator.
23

Empirical studies on sources of inequality

Sandberg, Anna January 2014 (has links)
This Ph.D. thesis in Economics consists of four self-contained chapters that empirically explore sources of economic inequality, using data from experiments, sports competitions, and Swedish registers. Competing biases: Effects of gender and nationality in sports judging explores in-group biases among judges in the equestrian sport dressage – the only Olympic sport with subjective performance evaluations in which male and female athletes compete as equals. International dressage competitions provide a rare opportunity to investigate gender bias and nationalistic bias in the same setting, using naturally occurring data on decisions of professional decision makers. Gender differences in initiation of negotiation: Does the gender of the negotiation counterpart matter? experimentally investigates how gender differences in the willingness to enter a wage negotiation are affected by whether the counterpart is a man or a woman. The importance of family background and neighborhood effects as determinants of crime uses Swedish register data to estimate sibling and neighborhood correlations in criminal convictions and incarceration. Omission effects in fairness behavior experimentally tests if individuals are more prone to act selfishly if they can passively allow for a self-serving outcome to be implemented rather than having to make an active choice. / <p>Diss. Stockholm :  Stockholm School of Economics, 2014. Introduction together with 4 papers</p>
24

The economics of altruism, paternalism and self-control

Breman, Anna January 2006 (has links)
Paper 1: Give More Tomorrow Many charities ask donors to commit to monthly contribution schemes. Monthly contributors give a fixed sum every month, which is automatically deducted from their bank account. These donors are the most profitable ones for a charity. On average, they give more than donors who contribute sporadically. They also facilitate the long-run financial planning of the charity, and they reduce the administrative and fundraising costs. What will influence a donor's decision to commit to a monthly contribution scheme? If the costs and benefits associated with contributing to a charity occur at different points in time, the answer will depend on the donor's inter-temporal preferences. More specifically, it will be of importance whether donors are time consistent or whether they exhibit present-biased preferences.  This paper designs and tests a fundraising strategy that allows for present-biased preferences among donors. The strategy, Give More Tomorrow, was implemented as a randomized field experiment in collaboration with a large charity. 1134 donors that make monthly contributions were randomly assigned to one of two treatment groups. In the first group, monthly donors were asked to increase their donation starting immediately. In the second group, monthly donors were asked to increase their donations starting two months later. Mean donations were 32 percent higher in the latter group, a highly significant difference. Donations conditional on giving were also significantly higher in the latter group. The effect of the GMT strategy is economically large and highly profitable to the charity. Paper 2: Crowding Out or Crowding In? The crowding-out hypothesis says that private givers, who are also taxpayers, will use their tax-financed donations as a substitute for their voluntary donations, thus reducing the net effectiveness of grants (Warr, 1982, 1983; Roberts, 1984; Bernheim, 1986; and Andreoni, 1988). While theory predicts a one-to-one relationship between government grants and private donations, econometric and experimental studies have found evidence of partial or no crowding out (see, e.g., Khanna et al., 1995; Payne, 1998; Khanna and Sandler, 2000; and Okten and Weisbrod, 2000). A recent contribution to this literature argues that government grants reduce the organizations' fundraising efforts, which may indirectly cause a decrease in private contributions (Andreoni and Payne, 2003). This paper employs a previously unexplored panel dataset to test whether government grants crowd out private donations to charitable organizations, controlling for changes in the organizations' fundraising behavior. The data covers all registered charitable organizations in Sweden between 1989 and 2003. We have a total of 361 organizations where the largest group is health related. The panel data allows us to control for unobserved organizational heterogeneity and time fixed effects. Furthermore, we use a 2SLS specification to control for possible endogeneity in government grants and fundraising expenditures. Complete crowding out can be strongly rejected. In the 2SLS regression, the estimated crowd-out is small and highly significant in the full sample, on average 5.0%. In the disaggregated sample, we cannot reject zero crowding out for any type of organization in the 2SLS regressions. Furthermore, we find strong evidence that organizations are net revenue maximizing, indicating that fundraising activities are efficient. Paper 3: Is Foreign Aid Paternalistic? (with Ola Granstrom and Felix Masiye) In this paper, we experimentally investigate whether donors are paternalistically altruistic when contributing to foreign aid. A paternalist may be defined as someone who advances other people's interests, such as life, health, or safety, at the expense of their liberty or autonomy. In economic theory, a donor is said to be paternalistically altruistic if he cares about a recipient's wellbeing, but does not fully respect the recipient's preferences (Pollak, 1988; Jones-Lee, 1991, 1992; Jacobsson et al., 2005). In a double-blind experiment, a subject chooses whether to make a monetary or a tied transfer (mosquito nets) to an anonymous household in Zambia. Recipients have revealed preferences for money, as their willingness to pay for mosquito nets is positive but below the market price. A monetary transfer will therefore preserve the household's preferences while a tied transfer is paternalistic. The mean donation of mosquito nets differs significantly from zero, thereby implying paternalistic preferences among donors. Paternalistic donors constitute 65 percent of the total sample, whereas purely altruistic donors constitute 15 percent. We conclude that health-focused paternalistic rather than purely altruistic preferences dominate the foreign-aid giving of individuals. Paper 4: Altruism without Borders? (with Ola Granstrom) Why do individuals contribute to foreign aid? Does the willingness to give increase the more we know about the recipients? Although there is some literature on the strategic interests of countries in providing foreign aid, (see, e.g., Alesina and Dollar, 2000) very little is yet known about which preferences guide the foreign-aid giving of individual donors. This paper experimentally tests altruism over borders. We design a cross-country dictator game where the degree of identification of the recipient is varied in four treatments: (1) anonymity, (2) photo, (3) information and (4) photo and information. In addition, questionnaire data on donor characteristics is gathered. The mean donation is 55%, which is considerably higher than in standard dictator games. In contrast to previous within-country experiments, we find no significant effect of identification on donations. Furthermore, we find that women donate significantly more than men (64 compared to 50 percent) and that those who state that aid is too large donate significantly less than those who state that aid is too small (24 compared to 67 percent). / Diss. Stockholm : Handelshögskolan, 2006 S. 5-7: Summary of Papers, S. 13-125: 4 papers
25

Aid, drugs, and informality : essays in empirical economics

Granström, Ola January 2008 (has links)
The first three papers of this Ph.D. thesis experimentally study the preferences of individuals making cross-border charitable donations. In Is Foreign Aid Paternalistic? (with Anna Breman and Felix Masiye) subjects choose whether to make a monetary or a tied transfer (mosquito nets) to an anonymous household in Zambia. The mean donation of mosquito nets differs significantly from zero, and paternalistic donors constitute a higher share of the sample than do purely altruistic donors. The second paper, Corruption and the Case for Tied Aid (with Anna Breman), compares the willingness to give money to Zambia's national health budget (CBoH) with the willingness to donate mosquito nets to a health-care clinic in Lusaka. Donors clearly prefer tied aid to untied program aid. Exit questionnaires suggest the reason to be a fear of corruption and misallocation at the CBoH. In Altruism without Borders? (with Anna Breman), we study whether the willingness to give increase with the information given about the recipients. We find no significant effect of identification on donations. Women and Informality: Evidence from Senegal, the fourth paper (with Elena Bardasi), uses household survey data to study women’s work and gender wage gaps in the formal and informal sector in Dakar. Multinomial logit analysis reveals that women are 3-4 times less likely to work formally rather than informally. Wage regressions reveal that little schooling, for instance, explains a considerable part of the gender wage gap. In the informal sector, however, the wage gap between men and women remains at 28%.    The fifth paper, Does Innovation Pay? A Study of the Pharmaceutical Product Cycle, examines how a drug’s life cycle depends on its degree of therapeutic innovation. All New Chemical Entities introduced in Sweden between 1987 and 2000 are rated into one of three innovation classes: A (important gains); B (modest gains); and C (little gains). Over a 15-year life cycle, the average class A drug raises 15% higher revenues than B drugs and 114% higher revenues than C drugs. But yearly class A and C sales differences are rarely significant. When comparing innovative (A and B pooled) and imitative (C) drugs, 15-year life cycle revenues of innovative drugs exceed those of imitative drugs by 100%. This sales difference is significant in 19 out of 20 years after launch. / Diss. Stockholm : Handelshögskolan i Stockholm, 2008 Sammanfattning jämte 5 uppsatser
26

Le discours politique du dictateur dans les littératures africaine-francophone et hispano-américaine : construction et production du sens / The political speech’s dictator in the african french-speaking literature and Spanish-american literature : construction and production of sense

Moussodji, Elie Stelle 09 January 2015 (has links)
Le discours politique du dictateur dans les champs littéraires africain et hispano-américain offre des perspectives d’étude immenses. En effet, la politique étant un milieu d’échange social, étudier les mécanismes de production du discours politique du dictateur et la construction de son sens par son auditoire est un domaine que nous avions souhaité explorer. Notre thèse a pour but de montrer justement, les mécanismes de production du discours du dictateur et comment l’auditoire élabore le travail d’encodage et de décodage de ce discours. Le but étant de mettre en évidence les différentes données qui contribuent à l’élaboration de ce sens, et de voir la participation de chacun des personnages actants à ce travail de collaboration. Nous avons abordé ce travail sous deux angles qui sont aussi ceux par lesquels se construit le sens du discours politique du dictateur dans nos œuvres corpus. Cette thèse met en lumière la construction, d’abord extra linguistique, du mécanisme de production et de construction du sens du discours du dictateur dans les champs littéraires choisis comme base pour notre étude. Et ensuite, nous avons mis les éléments langagiers qui concourent à la construction du sens. Notre méthode de recherche nous a contraint à faire appel à trois champs linguistiques sans lesquels nous n’aurions pu mener à bien cette recherche. La pragmatique nous a donc permis de faire une étude des éléments liés au contexte d’émission du discours qui rentrent en compte dans le processus d’encodage et de décodage du discours. Nous avons ensuite eu recours à la rhétorique qui nous a permis de voir comment le dictateur construit sa stratégie de discours et comment il élabore son argumentation. Et pour finir, la sémiologie nous a aidée dans la mise en évidence des moyens langagiers de construction du sens. / The political speech of the dictator in the African and Spanish-American literary fields offers huge perspectives of study. Indeed, the politics being an environment of social exchange, to study the mechanisms of production of the political speech of the dictator and the constructions of its sense by his public is a domain which we had wished to explore. Our thesis aims at showing exactly, the mechanisms of production of the speech of the dictator and how the public develops the work of encoding and decoding of this speech. The purpose being to highlight the various data which contribute to the elaboration of this sense, and to see the participation of each of the characters agents in this work of collaboration. We approached this work under two angles which are also the ones by whom builds itself the sense of the political speech of the dictator in our works corpus. This thesis brings to light the construction, at first extra linguistic, of the mechanism of production and construction of the sense of the speech of the dictator in the literary fields chosen as basis as our study. And then, we put the linguistic elements which contribute to the construction of the sense. Our method of research forced to us to call on to three linguistic fields without which we would not have been able to bring to a successful conclusion this research.The pragmatics thus allowed us to make a study of elements bound to the context of broadcast of the speech which go in account into the process of encoding and decoding of the speech. We then resorted to the rhetoric which allowed us to see how the dictator built his strategy of speech and how he develops his argumentation. And to finish, the semiology helped us in the highlighting of the linguistic ways of construction of the sense.
27

The “German” and “Nazi” In Chaplin’s <i>The Great Dictator</i>, Capra’s <i>The Nazis Strike</i> and Hitchcock’s <i>Lifeboat</i>

Ellis, Erin Jean 27 May 2009 (has links)
No description available.
28

How Does Ego Depletion Affect Moral Judgments and Pro-social Decisions? / Hur påverkar mental utmattning moraliska bedömningar och prosociala beslut?

Lemoine, Ida, Fredin, Peter January 2013 (has links)
BACKGROUND: Today’s societal changes, including high rate of change and increasing information flows, are increasing the demand on the individual mental capacity. It becomes increasingly difficult to analytically process all the different dilemmas and everyday decisions as individuals have a limited mental capacity available to make these decisions. Thus, it has been suggested that ego-depleted relies more heavily on intuition, which is less burdensome, when making decision. However little is known about to what extent intuitive decisions differ from analytic. Are ego-depleted individuals more or less likely to maximize outcome in moral dilemmas involving conflicting values? Do ego depleted individuals become more or less willing to cooperate? Do ego depleted individuals become more or less altruistic? Is our intuition more or less in accordance with Homo Economicus?AIM: Starting from a Dual Process perspective on decision-making the aim of this study is to examine how ego depletion affects moral judgment and pro-social decisions.METHOD: A laboratory experiment involving 115 subjects, using real monetary incentives, was conducted among students at Linköping University. Subjects were randomized into one of two treatments. Everything was identical across treatments except for the initial ego-depletion manipulation. Using a standard paradigm for ego-depletion subjects in treatment 1 were put under high cognitive load while subjects in treatment two were put under low cognitive load. Subjects faced 16 questions divided into four different decision tasks: Moral dilemmas, Public Goods game, two types of Dictator Game where the type of sacrifice subjects could make in order to contribute money to charity was varied.RESULTS: Subjects in the high cognitive load treatment made fewer consequentialists moral judgments compared to other subjects (p = 0.075). The effect is especially strong when looking only at high-conflict dilemmas such as Crying Baby. No difference between treatments was found for the public goods games. In the dictator game involving monetary sacrifice subjects donated less money to charity when put under high cognitive load. However the finding was not significant (p = 0.292). No difference was found in the dictator game involving effort as personal sacrifice since almost everyone chooses to donate to charity.CONCLUSION: According to The Dual Process perspective this essay shows that intuitive thinking does not evidently lead to that they makes decision that more or less is in accordance with Homo Economicus. The connection between ego depletion and pro-social decisions is more complex. Further research needs to investigate which different mental shortcuts that individuals uses in various types of pro-social decisions and why intuitive and analytical decision-making differ between different decisions. Further research within the area can identify potential mechanisms and policies that can support individuals’ capacity to make decisions in accordance with their own and society’s preferences.
29

LE AZIONI SONO PIù ELOQUENTI DELLE PAROLE? TESTI E GIOCHI IN UN ESPERIMENTO CONDOTTO IN DUE CARCERI STATUNITENSI / DO ACTIONS SPEAK LOUDER THAN WORDS? TEXTS AND GAMES IN AN EXPERIMENT HELD IN TWO AMERICAN PRISONS / DO ACTIONS SPEAK LOUDER THAN WORDS? TEXTS AND GAMES IN AN EXPERIMENT HELD IN TWO AMERICAN PRISONS.

ESPOSTO, ELENA 16 April 2018 (has links)
La tesi presenta alcuni dei risultati di un esperimento longitudinale condotto in due carceri statunitensi tra settembre 2015 e giugno 2016. L’obiettivo dell’analisi è testare lo studio delle preferenze sociali nella cornice dell’Economia Comportamentale e della teoria dei giochi (osservazione diretta del comportamento dei soggetti chiamati a compiere delle scelte in alcune situazioni selezionate), piuttosto che attraverso risposte a questionari auto valutativi. Infatti vengono messe in relazione i comportamenti osservati nei giochi e le spiegazioni che i soggetti intervistati danno di essi. Attraverso analisi statistica si può arrivare a dire che i comportamenti osservati nei giochi non sono sempre sufficienti per evidenziare le preferenze sociali dei soggetti, così come, del resto, non lo sono le risposte narrative. La conclusione che viene tratta dall’elaborato è che osservazione diretta dei comportamenti e analisi delle narrative personali dei soggetti sono due elementi ugualmente importanti per la comprensione delle preferenze sociali e che, lungi dall’escludersi a vicenda, si completano. / The thesis presents some of the results of a longitudinal experiment conducted in two U.S. prisons between September 2015 and June 2016. The objective of the analysis is to test the efficacy of studying social preferences in the framework of behavioral Economics and game theory (direct observation of the behaviour of the subjects asked to make choices in real situations), rather than through self-evaluative questionnaires and surveys. In fact, the analysis links the behaviors observed in the games and the explanations given by the subjects. In general it can be said that the behaviors observed in the games are not always sufficient to highlight the social preferences of the subjects, as well as, moreover, are not the narrative answers. The conclusion that comes from the elaborate is that direct observation of the behaviors and analysis of the personal narratives of the subjects are two equally important tools in the study social preferences and that, far from being mutually exclusive, they complement each other.
30

Participatory interventions for pro-social and collective action in natural resource management: An institutional and behavioural approach / Intervenciones participativas para la acción pro-social y colectiva en la gestión de los recursos naturales. Una aproximación desde el análisis institucional y del comportamiento

Ortiz-Riomalo, Juan Felipe 16 December 2020 (has links)
One of the main environmental policy challenges is convincing individuals and organisations to engage in socially desirable courses of action; that is, to have them internalise the consequences of their decisions. As contributions from institutional and behavioural economics have indicated, policies aimed at fostering pro-social action can be ineffective and even counterproductive if the interests and concerns of the relevant actors are not properly considered throughout the policy process. In fact, international conventions and national legislation around the world generally recommend stakeholder involvement in order to properly address pressing environmental challenges. The evidence that underpins and informs this recommendation, however, is still insufficient and scattered across different strands of literature. On the one hand, research on participatory governance has indeed systematically documented the potential for policymakers and resource managers to obtain high-quality, context-specific and legitimate input for environmental policymaking from participatory processes. On the other, the available research has also cast doubt on the potential of participatory processes to produce concrete change in (pro-social) action on the ground. In general, the success of these processes ultimately depends on their design, implementation and context. However, most of these conclusions stem from rich qualitative accounts of participatory processes, structured comparisons of cases and systematic reviews of case studies and the available literature. With this type of evidence, it is difficult to neatly identify the impact of participatory interventions on pro-social and cooperative behaviour and systematically assess the underlying mechanisms. This thesis addresses these knowledge gaps. The thesis investigates the extent to which and the mechanisms by which participatory interventions could foster (or hinder) pro-social and collective action for natural resource management and environmental protection. It comprises four chapters, each constituting a stand-alone, self-contained academic paper. Throughout the different chapters, the thesis reviews and integrates insights from the literature on participatory governance and from the institutional and behavioural analyses of pro-social and collective action. Furthermore, using two laboratory economic experiments (Chapters 3 and 4) and one framed lab-in-the-field experiment (Chapter 5), the thesis systematically assesses specific hypotheses concerning the potential impacts of participatory interventions on cooperative and pro-social behaviour and the underlying mechanisms of these impacts. The introductory chapter of the dissertation gathers, presents and discusses the insights gathered from each chapter. It expands on the motivations for the thesis, presents the general and specific research gaps and questions the thesis tackles and clarifies the conceptual, theoretical and methodological foundations upon which the thesis is grounded. Chapter 2 (entitled Participatory interventions for collective action in environmental and natural resource management) reviews the literature on participatory governance together with the literature on collective action in natural resource and environmental management. The main goal of this review is to contribute to integrating the main insights from both strands of literature regarding (a) the potential of participatory interventions to foster collective action and (b) the channels through which they might foment (or hinder) collective action. It therefore seeks to help integrate the insights from these different strands of literature, which, although related, have generally been disconnected until now. The chapter draws on the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework to organise these insights within a coherent conceptual framework. As the results of this literature review indicate, participatory interventions have the potential to foster collective action through two channels. Firstly, by helping resource users to change (and enhance) the rules, norms and strategies that constrain and guide their behaviour (the indirect channel) and, secondly, by directly influencing the specific behavioural factors (e.g. knowledge, trust, preferences, perceptions and beliefs) that collective action hinges upon (the direct channel). However, to sustain collective action, the relevant literature has consistently emphasised that trust needs to be continually cultivated and ensured. Therefore, in line with insights from earlier studies on participatory governance, the results of this literature review also indicate that practitioners and policymakers must not only design participatory interventions carefully to effectively build the trust needed to heighten and sustain collective action, but participatory interventions must also be adequately embedded within the broader (social-ecological and governance) context, providing for follow-up, enforcement, monitoring and conflict-resolution mechanisms. From Chapter 3 through Chapter 5, the thesis focuses on the direct channel, studying the potential of participatory interventions to directly influence behaviour within relevant economic action situations such as social dilemma and distributive action situations. Within a given environment and institutional context, the studies recreate processes commonly facilitated within participatory interventions. Chapter 3 assesses the effects of externally structured and facilitated processes of information exchange, and Chapters 4 and 5 examine the impact of inducing perspective-taking via role-switching techniques (Chapter 4) and instructions (Chapter 5). Thanks to this experimental approach, it is possible to systematically assess the behavioural impacts of these types of processes as well as the underlying mechanisms. Chapter 3 (entitled Structuring communication effectively for environmental cooperation) starts by reviewing previous experimental studies on the effects of two-way communication in social dilemmas to identify the elements that are commonly involved in effective communication processes. This review notes four cooperation-enhancing components of communication: (i) problem awareness, (ii) exploration of strategies to tackle the problem at hand, (iii) agreement on desirable joint strategies and (iv) ratification of agreed-upon strategies. A total of 560 students at Osnabrück University participated in a laboratory implementation of a voluntary contribution mechanism; a public goods game. The experiment implemented a series of interventions that represented these components of communication and contrasted the resulting levels of cooperation with the average outcomes of control groups interacting under either free (unstructured) communication or no communication whatsoever. The intervention that facilitated agreement on a common strategy (i.e. the combination of (ii) and (iii)) was particularly effective at boosting cooperation. Furthermore, combined with interventions promoting problem awareness and ratification, this intervention produced levels of cooperation similar to the average levels of cooperation observed in groups with free-form communication. The results of this experiment expand the understanding in the literature of the role of communication in social dilemmas and provide insights into the potential of structured and facilitated processes of information exchange and social interaction to foster collective action for environmental management. Chapter 4 (The effects of inducing perspective-taking through role reversal in a give-and-take a dictator game on pro-social behaviour) and Chapter 5 (Perspective-taking for pro-social behaviour in watershed management) deal with the effects of inducing perspective-taking on unilateral pro-social behaviour. The results outlined in Chapter 4 indicate that perspective-taking, induced through role reversal, can be associated with significant average changes in the participants’ self-reported state of emotions (in terms of both empathic and positive as well as in distressing and negative emotions). The emotional reactions that the role reversal seems to influence, however, do not appear to result in significantly more (or less) pro-social behaviour. The chapter explores and discusses two plausible explanations for these results, namely the transient effects of emotional reactions and the opposing effects of diverging emotional reactions on pro-social behaviour. These results come from the analysis of data from 144 students at Osnabrück University who participated as dictators in a laboratory implementation of a give-and-take dictator game. The design of the experiment allows the identification of the effect of inducing decision-makers to experience the other person’s position through unilateral role reversal on pro-social behaviour. During the simulation round, dictators in treatment groups experienced how it would feel to be in the role of the recipient. Dictators in the control groups only learned about the distributional consequences of their allocation decisions on recipients. Hence, through a treatment comparison, it was possible to single out the effects resulting from temporarily taking on the position of the other participant. To understand the underlying drivers of a potential behavioural change, the study elicited participants’ emotional states both before and after the simulation round. The results in Chapter 5 indicate that inducing perspective-taking can be associated with relatively greater pro-social behaviour based on an experimental study of downstream farmers’ behaviour in a watershed management context. Moreover, the provision of information on the social-ecological context during the perspective-taking exercise cannot account for the different behavioural patterns in the treatment and control groups. These results come from a lab-in-the-field experiment carried out with 177 downstream farmers in a Peruvian watershed. In the experiment, farmers in the treatment groups were motivated to imagine the upstream farmers’ perspective (i.e. to think about their thoughts and feelings) before deciding on whether or not to contribute to an initiative in the upper watershed. The initiative intends to help upstream farmers improve their well-being without compromising the water supply downstream. The behaviour of farmers in the treatment groups was compared against the behaviour of farmers in the control groups wherein perspective-taking was not induced. Taken together, the results of Chapter 4 and Chapter 5 illustrate the potential of inducing perspective-taking—commonly promoted in participatory processes—to trigger pro-social behaviour in economic situations. It can indeed alter relevant behavioural variables and trigger pro-social behaviour in distributive and social-dilemma situations. Nevertheless, as the literature on perspective-taking has previously indicated, the final effects depend on the specific procedures by which and the situations and contexts wherein perspective-taking is induced. Based on these findings, it is possible to sustain that participatory interventions do have the potential to effect changes in pro-social and cooperative behaviour at both the collective and individual level. Whether this impact is realised or hindered hinges on the procedures and contexts of participatory interventions. It would also depend on the mechanisms provided to follow up on the initiated processes and sustain and build upon the early outcomes. The contributions of this thesis are threefold. Firstly, it integrates insights from the literature on the institutional and behavioural analysis of pro-social and collective action and the literature on participatory governance for natural resource management. Secondly, it generates new evidence, based on experimental methods, in terms of the potential for participatory interventions to foster pro-social and collective action, and in terms of the mechanisms by which participatory methods and processes could effectively impact (or hinder) pro-social and cooperative behaviour. In this way, the thesis helps to bridge the gap of knowledge in terms of how participatory interventions can effectively change behaviour and, subsequently, encourage socially desirable social-ecological outcomes. In doing so, it also adds to the understanding of pro-social and cooperative human behaviour and the way that the processes of information-exchange and perspective-taking, which are often facilitated by participatory processes, may (or may not) advance it. Research on participation is, however, still ongoing and, in terms of the way forward, the thesis makes a third, methodological contribution. It demonstrates how experimental research in both the laboratory and in the field, conducted under a coherent conceptual and methodological framework, can complement one another and shed light on the extent to which and the means by which participatory interventions can produce changes in behaviour. The experimental method, in terms of both laboratory and field experiments, can therefore complement the set of methods traditionally employed to analyse participatory processes. The results of the studies comprising the thesis underscore the importance of carefully analysing the policy process. As contributions from the behavioural literature have repeatedly indicated, human behaviour is driven by a combination of self-regarding, social and procedural preferences. Hence, addressing pressing environmental challenges involving externalities and social dilemmas not only entails getting the policy design right to synergistically coordinate and orchestrate these different types of preferences. It also requires careful design, analysis and implementation of the activities and methods that structure and facilitate stakeholder interactions throughout the policy process.

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