Group Image Concerns
Do people care about the image of groups to which they belong? Do Christians worry about whether members of their religion are perceived as charitable? Does it matter to Republicans whether their party’s members are perceived as patriotic? Social image concerns – the extent to which people care about what others think of them – have been shown to be an important driver of economic as well as moral behaviors. In many instances, however, people act not just as representatives of themselves, but as representatives of the groups to which they belong. Inferences about whether one’s group is moral, smart, or generous potentially influence an individual’s well-being and behavior as much as inferences about herself. In this project, we aim to identify and quantify (for the first time) the extent to which people care about the image of groups they belong to. We present an experimental paradigm for separating group image concerns from individual image concerns. Our experiments provide several metrics for the strength of group image concerns: first, we measure how much money (respectively, effort) people are willing to spend to improve their group‘s image. Second, we use a money-metric approach to measure people's willingness to report both good and bad things about their group – provided that these reports reveal nothing about the individual herself. In this way, we are able to quantify the extent to which people associate shame and pride with their group's image. We present a controlled laboratory experiment (with students from the Universities of Bonn and Cologne) as well as the results of online experiments with U.S. subjects on group image concerns related to generosity, patriotism, and intelligence.