Immoral criminals? An experimental study of social preferences among prisoners

Abstract

This paper studies the pro-social preferences of criminals by comparing the behavior of a group of prisoners in a lab experiment with the behavior of a benchmark group recruited from the general population. We find a striking similarity in the importance the two groups attach to pro-social preferences in both in strategic and non-strategic situations. This result also holds when the two groups interact. Data from a large internet experiment, matched with official criminal records, suggest that our main finding from the lab experiment is not in influenced by the additional scrutiny experienced by participants in prison.