El martes, 29 de abril, a las 11h, en la Sala de Juntas de Filosofía, tuvo lugar otra sesión del seminario TeC-FiloLab. Nos acompañó Bartosz Janik, de la Universidad Jaguelónica de Cracovia (Polonia). Más abajo tenéis el título y un resumen de la charla.
Title: Rules and coordination – behavioral results
Abstract: The interpretation of (legal) norms has only recently become the subject of experimental investigations. So far, they are based on vignette studies, asking participants whether a rule was violated in a fictional scenario. The results speak more to legal judgment than legal compliance: Participants evaluate the behavior of others as a third party, and both judgment and fictional decisions have little consequence. This may change how rules are interpreted: One of the main findings in vignettes is that subjects interpret a norm primarily in line with its text instead of its purpose, especially when asked to coordinate with one another. The salience of textual meaning may, however, be diminished if it disregards the purpose of a norm at the (real) expense of others or themselves.
This study addresses some of those shortcomings by introducing a real-life behavioral task (dictator game) during which participants choose from available options for resource allocation with a predetermined rule to follow and with a clearly stated purpose of this rule. The main manipulation of the study consists of giving participants scenarios in which the text and the purpose of a rule are aligned and three types of cases in which test and purpose diverge. We also used the social value orientation measure and simple rule-following task to control for other possible explanations for assumed differences between cases.
