| dc.description.abstract | In this thesis, I study the effect of legitimacy on people’s willingness to implement
a hard paternalistic intervention towards another person. In an incentivised
experiment, participants decide whether to restrict the freedom of a stakeholder to
prevent said stakeholder from making a mistake. I vary participants’ sense of
legitimacy along two dimensions: whether they have been given positive feedback
on their performance on a set of cognitive tasks (merit), and whether they have
been assigned a leader role in relation to the stakeholder in question (leadership).
I find that people become less willing to implement the hard paternalistic
intervention after being assigned a leadership role. I do not find significant effects
of receiving positive feedback on performance on people’s willingness to
intervene. My results shed light on how paternalistic preferences may change
depending on the degree of hierarchy in interpersonal relationships. Thus, they
offer insights into paternalistic motivation in a wide range of hierarchical
interpersonal relationships throughout society, such as those between employers
and their employees, doctors and their patients, lawyers and their clients or parents
and their children. | en_US |
