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Registration

Field Before After
Trial Status in_development completed
Last Published July 22, 2022 03:32 PM March 26, 2026 03:56 AM
Study Withdrawn No
Intervention Completion Date July 15, 2022
Data Collection Complete Yes
Final Sample Size: Total Number of Observations 232 subjects
Final Sample Size (or Number of Clusters) by Treatment Arms 116 pairs (55 in Baseline, 61 in Hidden Information). This was a failed replication attempt. New replication attempt (successful), followed by main study, was preregistered at https://www.socialscienceregistry.org/trials/11289. The present study is thus only reported in the appendix of the resulting paper.
Public Data URL https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/XMW7T
Is there a restricted access data set available on request? No
Program Files No
Data Collection Completion Date July 15, 2022
Is data available for public use? Yes
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Papers

Field Before After
Paper Abstract Since ignorance can serve as an excuse for selfish behavior, people sometimes avoid learning about possible negative externalities of their actions. In social situations, however, others might provide the information anyway. How do potential informers affect willful ignorance and the resulting social outcomes? We introduce a third-party potential informer into the moral wiggle-room game. Almost half of the dictators avoided information only to have it imposed upon them by the informer. Most of these unwillingly-informed dictators revised their behavior to benefit the recipient, even at a cost to themselves. While knowledge of the informer’s presence did not change dictators’ propensity to seek information, a subtle change in the experimental choice interface did: The share of dictators choosing ignorance was more than halved when dictator’s ignorance and allocation choices were made in two separate decision screens rather than a single one.
Paper Citation Grossman, Z., T. Hua, J.T. Lind, K. Nyborg (2026): Unwillingly informed: the prosocial impact of third-party informers, Journal of Environmental Economics and Management (in press), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeem.2026.103330.
Paper URL https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeem.2026.103330
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