ICES Experimental Economics Brown Bag Lecture
A Laboratory Test of Employment as a Social Bonding Mechanism
Thursday, April 2, 2026 12:00 PM to 1:00 PM EDT
Vernon Smith Hall (formerly Metropolitan Building), Room 5075
The Interdisciplinary Center for Economic Science (ICES) presents an ICES Brown Bag Lecture featuring:
George Mason University
A Laboratory Test of Employment as a Social Bonding Mechanism
Abstract
Formerly incarcerated individuals reoffend at high rates, a pattern that criminologists have long attributed to the failure of reentry to generate meaningful social bonds. Drawing on Hirschi's (1969) social bond theory and Sampson and Laub's (1993) age-graded extension, we propose that employment reduces recidivism not merely through incapacitation of time, but by creating interpersonal attachments and stakes in conformity that shift the perceived utility of harmful behavior. Despite broad theoretical support for this mechanism, direct causal evidence remains elusive due to the endogeneity of employment and the difficulty of observing bond formation in the field. This study addresses that gap through a laboratory experiment that isolates the social bonding mechanism using a novel public goods game with an embedded crime option. Participants in groups of four complete collaborative production tasks, with one or more members holding a button that allows unilateral extraction from the group pot at a probabilistic cost of detection and removal. We vary three factors in a 2×2×2 factorial design: task interdependence (group versus individual), task engagement (menial versus cognitively stimulating), and crime option visibility (public versus private). Communication between participants is permitted and recorded, allowing us to measure social bond formation directly through linguistic markers of group identity and reciprocity. We predict that interdependent collaboration will reduce crime option use, that this effect will be mediated by bond formation, and that task engagement and public visibility will amplify the baseline effect. Findings will provide causal evidence for the bonding mechanism underlying employment-based desistance interventions and offer a replicable experimental paradigm for testing prosocial reintegration policies.
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