Framing Effect on Performance, Cooperation and Stealing

Framing a reward in a gain frame or a loss frame lets individuals act differently. Performance of the individual has often been the main topic in studies, but (unmonitored) spillover behavior outside the given task has not been studied much and might be affected as well. In this real effort task experiment it is found that the performance does not differ significantly between the treatment group and the control group. Looking at spillover effects, the proportion of cooperative individuals does not differ significantly. However, once an individual does cooperate, the degree to which an individual is cooperative differs between the treatment group and the control group. Also, the proportion of individuals stealing and the amount of things stolen while at it, differ significantly.