In this issue we feature 7 current papers on the theme of social capital:

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In this issue we have:

1. I lie? We lie! Why? Experimental evidence on a dishonesty shift in groups - Kocher, Martin G.; Schudy, Simeon; Spantig, Lisa
2. Civility vs. Incivility in Online Social Interactions: An Evolutionary Approach - Antoci, Angelo; Delfino, Alexia; Paglieri, Fabio; Panebianco, Fabrizio; Sabatini, Fabio
3. The Choice of Honesty: An Experiment Regarding Heterogeneous Responses to Situational Social Norms - Rajna GIBSON BRANDON; Carmen TANNER; Alexander F. WAGNER
4. Tweet-tales: moods of socio-economic crisis? Grazia Biorci; Antonella Emina; Michelangelo Puliga; Lisa Sella; Gianna Vivaldo
5. In God We Learn? Religions’ Universal Messages, Context-Specific Effects and Minority Status - Pierre-Guillaume Méon; Ilan Tojerow
6. Public Trust Among Citizen: Inner Cultural Questions - Chanida Jittaruttha
7. Peer Pressure: Social Interaction and the Disposition Effect - Heimer, Rawley

1. I lie? We lie! Why? Experimental evidence on a dishonesty shift in groups

   Kocher, Martin G.

   Schudy, Simeon

   Spantig, Lisa

 Unethical behavior such as dishonesty, cheating and corruption occurs  frequently in organizations or groups. Recent experimental evidence suggests  that there is a stronger inclination to behave immorally in groups than  individually. We ask if this is the case, and if so, why. Using a  parsimonious laboratory setup, we study how individual behavior changes when  deciding as a group member. We observe a strong dishonesty shift. This shift  is mainly driven by communication within groups and turns out to be  independent of whether group members face payoff commonality or not (i.e.

 whether other group members benefit from one’s lie). Group members come up  with and exchange more arguments for being dishonest than for complying with  the norm of honesty. Thereby, group membership shifts the perception of the  validity of the honesty norm and of its distribution in the population.

   Keywords: dishonesty; lying; group decisions; communication; norms; experiment

   JEL: C91 C92 D03

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:lmu:muenec:28966&r=soc

2. Civility vs. Incivility in Online Social Interactions: An Evolutionary Approach

   Antoci, Angelo

   Delfino, Alexia

   Paglieri, Fabio

   Panebianco, Fabrizio

   Sabatini, Fabio

 Evidence is growing that forms of incivility –e.g. aggressive and  disrespectful behaviors, harassment, hate speech and outrageous claims– are  spreading in the population of social networking sites’ (SNS) users. Online  social networks such as Facebook allow users to regularly interact with known  and unknown others, who can behave either politely or rudely. This leads  individuals not only to learn and adopt successful strategies for using the  site, but also to condition their own behavior on that of others. Using a  mean field approach, we define an evolutionary game framework to analyse the  dynamics of civil and uncivil ways of interaction in online social networks  and their consequences for collective welfare. Agents can choose to interact  with others –politely or rudely– in SNS, or to opt out from online social  networks to protect themselves from incivility. We find that, when the  initial share of the population of polite users reaches a critical level,  civility becomes generalized if its payoff increases more than that of  incivility with the spreading of politeness in online interactions.

 Otherwise, the spreading of self-protective behaviors to cope with online  incivility can lead the economy to non-socially optimal stationary states.

   Keywords: online incivility; evolutionary dynamics; self-protective behavior; social networks; dynamics of social interaction; social networking sites; Internet.

   JEL: C61 C63 D85 O3 O33 Z13

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:72454&r=soc

3. The Choice of Honesty: An Experiment Regarding Heterogeneous Responses to Situational Social Norms

   Rajna GIBSON BRANDON (University of Geneva and Swiss Finance Institute)

   Carmen TANNER (University of Zurich)

   Alexander F. WAGNER (University of Zurich and Swiss Finance Institute)  We conduct a laboratory experiment in which we expose participants to  situational social norms of approval or disapproval of lying. While  participants on average conform to the situational pressure, the results  highlight important differences in individual reactions. Situational norms  crowd out intrinsic preferences for truthfulness; conversely, these  preferences support resistance against "bad" norms. The extent and direction  of the interaction of individual characteristics with situational norms and  with economic incentives shed light on why people act truthfully. Out of  several possible explanations, self-signaling under situational pressure  provides the most convincing account of the evidence from the experiment.

   Keywords: Crowding-out, honesty, norm conformity, protected values, self-signaling, situational social norms.

   JEL: G02 G30 C91 M14

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:chf:rpseri:rp1501&r=soc

4. Tweet-tales: moods of socio-economic crisis?

   Grazia Biorci (CNR-Ircres, Genova)

   Antonella Emina (CNR-Ircres, Moncalieri)

   Michelangelo Puliga (IMT School for Advanced studies Lucca)

   Lisa Sella (CNR-Ircres, Moncalieri)

   Gianna Vivaldo (IMT School for Advanced studies Lucca)  The widespread adoption of highly interactive social media like Twitter,  Facebook and other platforms allow users to communicate moods and opinions to  their social network. Those platforms represent an unprecedented source of  information about human habits and socio-economic interactions. Several new  studies have started to exploit the potential of these big data as  fingerprints of economic and social interactions. The present analysis aims  at exploring the informative power of indicators derived from social media  activity, with the aim to trace some preliminary guidelines to investigate  the eventual correspondence between social media indices and available labour  market indicators at a territorial level. The study is based on a large  dataset of about 4 million Italian-language tweets collected from October

 2014 to December 2015, filtered by a set of specific keywords related to the  labour market. With techniques from machine learning and user’s  geolocalization, we were able to subset the tweets on specific topics in all  Italian provinces. The corpus of tweets is then analyzed with linguistic  tools and hierarchical clustering analysis. A comparison with traditional  economic indicators suggests a strong need for further cleaning procedures,  which are then developed in detail. As data from social networks are easy to  obtain, this represents a very first attempt to evaluate their informative  power in the Italian context, which is of potentially high importance in  economic and social research.

   Keywords: Big data, social media, Twitter, hierarchical clustering, unemployment

   JEL: C4 C49 C55 C81 E24

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ial:wpaper:04/2016&r=soc

5. In God We Learn? Religions’ Universal Messages, Context-Specific Effects and Minority Status

   Pierre-Guillaume Méon

   Ilan Tojerow

 Pierre-Guillaume Méon and Ilan TojerowWe study the relationship between major  religious denominations and individuals’ levels of education, using the World  Values Survey. In a first step, running country-by-country regressions, we  report first-time evidence that no single denomination has a universal effect  on education. Each denomination has a positive and statistically significant  effect in some countries, a negative and statistically significant effect in  others, and a statistically insignificant effect elsewhere. In a second step,  we relate the sign of the impact of a denomination in a country to whether  the denomination is a minority in that country. We find that denominations  that are a minority in a country are more likely to be associated with a  higher level of education, and less likely to be associated with a lower  level of education in that country. In both steps, the findings are  independent from the specification of the regressions used in the first stage  to determine the sign of the impact of denominations on educational outcomes.

 The finding of the second step is moreover robust to defining minority  denominations using various thresholds. It is robust to controlling for  whether the denomination is a state religion, for the country’s level of  democracy, per capita GDP, or level of education, to introducing denomination- and country- fixed effects, and to controlling for the identity  of the largest other denomination in the country.

   Keywords: religion; education; minority

   JEL: I20 O50 Z10

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:sol:wpaper:2013/233535&r=soc

6. Public Trust Among Citizen: Inner Cultural Questions

   Chanida Jittaruttha (Chulalongkorn University) 

The new democratic governments often inherited a citizenry with low levels of  trust in public institutions and with the habit of relying on inter-personal  relations, not public institutions and laws. Public administration scholars  generally agree that public ethics are a prerequisite to public trust and a  keystone of good governance. Lewis and Cartron (1996, p. 699) stated that  “Public service is a public trust. If there is anything unique about public  service, it derives from this proposition†. When people think of public  ethics, honesty is an important substantive value with a close connection to  trust for it implies both truth - telling and responsible behavior that seeks  to abide by the rules (Rose - Ackerman, 2001). Fair and reliable public  services inspire public trust and create a favorable environment for  businesses, thus contributing to well - functioning markets and economic  growth (OECD, 2000; 2004). This article aimed to study the level of public  trust among Thai citizens which were perceived on ethics of government and  officials (Yingluck’s government period). Both questionnaires and interview  schedule were synthesized from relevant literatures to explore a field. The  findings are as follows: (1) citizen perception on the ethics of honesty of  government and officials is at very low level, (2) citizen trust in  government and officials was shown at a low level among three realms of trust  perception - trustworthiness/ basis trust/ trust culture, (3) relationship  between the ethics of government and officials and citizen trust were  positively correlated in the same direction at high level (r=.928), (4)  apparent behaviors of government and officials’ honesty have disparity from  those expected ones at very high level (sig .876) and (5) major barriers of  public trust were caused by unethical norms and behaviors, distrust culture,  bureaucracy and parliament intervention, unethical leader, mega-project  corruption, illegal policy such as ‘amnesty bill’ (6) alignments to  cultivate public trust are incorruptibility, public interest and justice  preservation, transparency and accountability, respect for the worth,  dignity, and diversity, commitment to excellence and to maintaining the  public trust. The article postulates sufficient evidence to conclude that  citizen trust on the ethics of government and officials is at low level. It  highlights where existing measures match the theories and shows a number of  trust deficiency, especially over the content of the trust belief correlated  with the ethics of honesty and the possible alignments for re contributing  public trust among citizen.

   Keywords: Public Trust, Ethics of Honesty, Corruption, Inner Cultural Questions

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:sek:iacpro:4006414&r=soc

7. Peer Pressure: Social Interaction and the Disposition Effect

   Heimer, Rawley (Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland)  Social interaction contributes to some traders’ disposition effect. New data  from an investment-specific social network linked to individual-level trading  records builds evidence of this connection. To credibly estimate causal peer  effects, I exploit the staggered entry of retail brokerages into partnerships  with the social trading web platform and compare trader activity before and  after exposure to these new social conditions. Access to the social network  nearly doubles the magnitude of a trader’s disposition effect. Traders  connected in the network develop correlated levels of the disposition effect,  a finding that can be replicated using workhorse data from a large discount  brokerage.

   Keywords: Social Network; Investments; Disposition Effect; Influence;

   JEL: G01 G11

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fip:fedcwp:1618&r=soc

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