Motivational Cherry Picking

We construct a simple three person trust game with one trustor and two trustees. The trustorhas the possibility to either trust both trustees or none, while the trustees make their decisionseither sequentially or simultaneously, depending on the treatment. When trustees play sequentially,follower trustees who are informed about the leader's choice are signicantly less kind than in thesimultaneous move treatment as well as the leader trustees. These ndings can not be explained bymodels of inequity aversion, pure guilt aversion, or conformity. Instead, follower trustees cherry pickthe motivation that serves them best. When the leader trustee played unkind, they tend to conformand play unkind, too. When the leader made a kind choice, followers seem to perceive the duty ofreciprocating to the trustor as already fullled by the leader. While guilt works well as a motivationalforce in a dyadic situation, it gets alleviated easily when there is someone to shift responsibility to,like the leader in our three person game.