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2019 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

8. Intermediated Social Preferences: Altruism in an Algorithmic Era

Author : Daniel L. Chen

Published in: Advances in the Economics of Religion

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

What are the consequences of intermediating moral responsibility through complex organizations or transactions? This chapter examines individual decision-making when choices are known to be obfuscated under randomization. It reports the results of a data entry experiment in an online labor market. Individuals enter data, grade another individual’s work, and decide to split a bonus. However, before they report their decision, they are randomized into settings with different degrees of intermediation. The key finding is that less generosity results when graders are told the split might be implemented by a new procurement algorithm. The asocial treatment results in less generosity relative to those whose decisions are averaged or randomly selected among a set of human graders. These findings relate to “the great transformation” whereby moral mentalities are shaped by modes of (a)social interaction.

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Appendix
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Footnotes
1
Malleability of moral reasoning by judges has been documented in US federal circuit judges (Ash et al. 2016; Chen 2017b; Chen et al. 2016d), federal district judges (Chen 2017a; Barry et al. 2016), immigration judges (Chen et al. 2016c), sentencing judges (Chen and Prescott 2016; Chen and Philippe 2017), military judges (Chen 2017c), and juvenile judges (Eren and Mocan 2016). Some of these findings can be attributed to snap judgments whether from analysis of the first three seconds of oral arguments (Chen et al. 2016a, 2017a) or from early predictability of judicial decisions based on race or nationality (Chen et al. 2017; Chen and Eagel 2017).
 
2
Outside the lab, the malleability of injunctive norms to formal institutions such as the law (Chen and Yeh 2016b, 2014; Chen et al. 2017b) or markets (Chen 2015b; Chen and Lind 2016; Chen 2016) is suggestive of the impact of broader historical shifts in human rights (Chen 2005), sexual harassment (Chen and Sethi 2016), and free speech (Chen 2015a). This chapter also shares the experimental approach to measure normative commitments (Chen et al. 2016b; Shaw et al. 2011).
 
3
http://​behind-the-enemy-lines.​blogspot.​com/​2008/​03/​mechanical-turk-demographics.​html. Some workers do it out of need. A disabled former United States Army linguist became a Turk Worker for various reasons, and in nine months he made 4000 dollars (New York Times, March 25, 2007). Some drop out of college to pursue a full-time career with these disaggregated labor markets (Web Worker Daily, October 16, 2008, Interview with oDesk CEO). For more information about the motivation and demographics of Mechanical Turk workers, see, for example, Paolacci et al. (2010).
 
4
Payscale, Salary Snapshot for Data Entry Operator Jobs, http://​www.​payscale.​com/​research/​IN/​Job=​Data_​Entry_​Operator/​Salary?​, accessed June 17, 2011.
 
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Metadata
Title
Intermediated Social Preferences: Altruism in an Algorithmic Era
Author
Daniel L. Chen
Copyright Year
2019
Book
Advances in the Economics of Religion

Print ISBN: 978-3-319-98847-4

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-319-98848-1

Copyright Year: 2019

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98848-1_8