Ode to the sea: Workplace Organizations and Norms of Cooperation / Uri Gneezy, Andreas Leibbrandt, John A. List.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Gneezy, Uri.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Leibbrandt, Andreas.

List, John A.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w20234.

NBER working paper series no. w20234

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Other Title:

Ode to the sea

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2014.

Summary:

The functioning and well-being of any society and organization critically hinges on norms of cooperation that regulate social activities. Empirical evidence on how such norms emerge and in which environments they thrive remains a clear void in the literature. To provide an initial set of insights, we overlay a set of field experiments in a natural setting. Our approach is to compare behavior in Brazilian fishermen societies that differ along one major dimension: the workplace organization. In one society (located by the sea) fishermen are forced to work in groups whereas in the adjacent society (located on a lake) fishing is inherently an individual activity. We report sharp evidence that the sea fishermen trust and cooperate more and have greater ability to coordinate group actions than their lake fishermen counterparts. These findings are consistent with the argument that people internalize social norms that emerge from specific needs and support the idea that socio-ecological factors play a decisive role in the proliferation of pro-social behaviors.

Notes:

Print version record

June 2014.