Altruism Avoidance under Risk and Ambiguity

Using a modification of ‘corruption’ game we present a result that are in line with motivated belief theories. In our experiment, individuals were shown to use uncertainties to justify their selfish actions. These uncertainties are shown to generate rooms for individuals to bias their belief through a manipulative way of information processing, to a direction of self-interest. In particular, there are two types of uncertainties that are addressed in this paper, namely, risk and ambiguity. We then show that individuals use ambiguity more strategically than risk to lever their selfish actions due to the use of subjective probabilities in assessing ambiguous situation.