| Summary: | We argue that people
choosing prosocial distribution of goods (e.g., in dictator games) make this
choice because they do not want to disappoint their partner rather than because
of a direct preference for the chosen prosocial distribution. The chosen
distribution is a means to fulfil one's partner's expectations. We review the
economic experiments that corroborate this hypothesis and the experiments that
deny that beliefs about others' expectations motivate prosocial choice. We then
formulate hypotheses about what types of expectation motivate someone to do
what is expected: these are justifiable hopeful expectations that are clearly
about his own choices. We experimentally investigate how people modulate their
prosociality when they face low or unreasonably high expectations. In a version
of a dictator game, we provide dictators with the opportunity to modulate their
transfer as a function of their partner's expectations. We observe that a
significant portion of the population is willing to fulfil their partner's
expectation provided that this expectation expresses a reasonable hope. We
conclude that people are averse to disappointing and we discuss what models of
social preferences can account for the role of expectations in determining
prosocial choice, with a special attention to models of guilt aversion and
social esteem.
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