in precautions than potential injurers to prevent an accident, i.e., c(xnl) +c(xsl)<
c(ysl) +c(ynl).
These tests show that the distributions of care investments are different between injurers and victims. On the basis of the neuroscientific contributions and of the exper-imental literature on prosocial behavior and other-regarding preferences, individuals should be expected to undertake more precautions to prevent a monetary loss to others rather than to self (Hypothesis 5.2.4). On the contrary, the experimental results show that subjects spent more resources to avoid suffering a loss rather than causing it.
This result is coherent with the contributions on prosocial preferences which show that people care about the others’ monetary outcome, but less than their own (Engel, 2011). Nevertheless, the observation of relatively hypoaltruistic behavior in the con-text of accident prevention suggests that the valuation of others’ well-beings is highly context-dependent.
Result 5.4.5 shows that people spend more resources to avoid suffering a loss rather than to avoid causing a loss to others. This is a novel result which adds to the extant contributions on prosocial preferences, and stands in contrast with the observation that individuals dislike being responsible of bad outcomes, especially when they affect the others’ well-being (Ritov and Baron, 1990; Kahneman, 2011). Under this perspective, the added cost of moral responsibility should have led people to value others’ losses more than their own.
This experiment adds another perspective to these previous contributions. The re-sults show that individuals are more averse in suffering a loss to self rather than in causing a loss to others. There are several potential explanations for these findings.
First, the consequences of subjects’ care decisions on others’ well-being is uncertain, and people might have biased risk-perceptions depending upon their role in an acci-dent. Potential injurers might be unrealistically optimistic about their ability to avoid an accident, whereas potential victims might perceive unrealistically high rates of risks for themselves (DeJoy, 1989). This could ultimately lead injurers to undertake less pre-cautions than victims. Even when potential victims are not pessimistically biased, they could expect injurers’ optimistic bias and compensate their unrealistic risk perceptions by undertaking more precautions.
An alternative explanation stems from the possibly different perception of eco-nomic and pain-and-suffering damages (Cohen and Miller, 2003; Avraham, 2015).
This experiment considered economic damages and perfect compensation. Potential injurers might become more willing to undertake care measures in the presence of
pain-and-suffering damages, but victims might remain more harm-averse especially in case of imperfect compensation of noneconomic damages. The consideration of noneconomic damages might thus either reduce the difference in care investments be-tween injurers and victims or left it unchanged. Future investigations which include pain-and-suffering damages and imperfect compensation may make it possible to ana-lyze the conditions under which my results hold.
A third possibility arises from the fact that in this experiment the monetary loss falls entirely on one of the two subjects. This might lead the victims to undertake more precautions than injurers given the potential threat to their personal property, even if damages are compensated. Injurers, on the contrary, do not suffer any damage to their personal property and are less willing to adopt precautions. For example, a driver might be less averse in causing a damage to another car and pay the compensation, rather than suffering a damage to his own vehicle, even if compensated. The willingness to protect personal properties might prevail over the compensation damages. In other words, individuals care about own personal properties, regardless of the compensatory system in place in case of damages.
Other questions still have to be answered, opening the possibility for further re-search on this topic. One of them is whether the results of my experiment would generalize to a bilateral-care model. In unilateral-care accidents, only one of the two subjects can reduce the probability of an accident by undertaking precautions, while the other subject is completely passive. In bilateral-care accidents, both parties’ de-cisions affect the probability of an accident. Results might substantially change if
subjects know that also others can invest in care to avoid an accident. Determining how people behave under different accident frameworks remain an empirical question.
Future research and field methods might explore the boundaries of subjective val-uations of harm in an accident setting by varying the parameters of this study. For example, it is possible that the “aversion-to-suffer” found in this research is limited to harms of medium consequences (in this experiment, the damages amount to §80 on
§140 of initial endowment); to property damages; and to a relatively wide probability of having an accident (in this experiment, the probability of an accident ranges from 25 to 85 percent). Other extensions might also include the uncertainty of being victims or injurers in an accident, and the possibility that also injurers suffer a share of the loss together with the victims. Different results might also arise when distinguishing the care choices by male and female participants.
This study provided a novel context for testing moral preferences and investigating antisocial behaviors. The results show a greater aversion to be injured rather than to cause a loss. Understanding the boundary conditions of this observation has implica-tions for many legal and political decisions about social interacimplica-tions in risky situaimplica-tions.