UC San Diego

This dissertation comprises three papers exploring the tradeoffs individuals navigate in social contexts, particularly when balancing personal benefits against moral, social, and self-regulatory concerns. Each chapter examines distinct contexts where individuals’ decisions are affected by social pressures, shedding light on how resources, risk perceptions, and behavioral feedback shape these tradeoffs.

Chapter 1 investigates why people do not advocate for their time, finding that individuals are less likely to complain when their time is violated, even if the harm is equivalent to monetary losses. Across multiple experiments, this chapter reveals that time, unlike money, has no defined rules, lacking an automatic moral trigger, making complaints about time seem petty and less justified. This reluctance underscores the need for employers and platforms to respect workers’ time, as individuals may not advocate for it as strongly as they would for financial resources.

Chapter 2 examines motivated unrealistic optimism in risk-taking, showing that individuals perceive risks they impose on others as less severe than those they would accept for themselves. This phenomenon leads people to prioritize personal benefits over potential harm to others, driven by biased, motivated assessments of risk. These findings help explain selfish behavior in moral decision-making, with implications for policies and everyday decisions that require weighing private cost and benefits against the costs and benefits to others.

Chapter 3 assesses the influence of streak-based feedback in digital self-regulation, using a field experiment with an app designed to disrupt habitual social media use. Results show that while highlighting streaks motivates users to build positive patterns and break negative ones, it also increases social media engagement overall. This contributes to emerging work on maladaptive gamification, revealing how consumer preference for gamified feedback can lead to goal-inconsistent behavior.

Together, these chapters contribute to our understanding of decision-making tradeoffs in social contexts, illustrating how norms, perception, and feedback mechanisms influence behavior in ways that may harm our individual and collective well-being.