The proportion offered in the Dictator and Ultimatum games decreases with crowd and social distance (2023)

Research to date shows that delaying a reward in the dictator game contributes to less generous offers. If the reason for such results is temporal discounting, it is to be expected that the lagging effect would be stronger for those with a higher discount rate, likewise the analogous pattern should appear in the ultimatum game. The participants in our study made decisions in the dictator and ultimatum game as proposers and responders. We manipulated a reward's delay (from now to 5 years from now) and social distance (from the closest person known only by sight). We observed the expected but weak interaction effect between lag and time discounting. However, the correlation analyzes did not confirm the significant association between temporal discounting and decisions made in dictator and ultimatum games. Also, offers decrease with social distance, in both the Dictator and Ultimatum games. However, social distance does not affect the value of the accepted offer in the ultimatum game. Such a mismatch between donor behavior and beneficiary expectations can represent a subtle but significant failure of real donation markets.

The experimental literature has accumulated evidence for the association of social identity with higher or lower levels of prosocial behavior. There is also evidence that donations are affected by the mere provision of information about recipients, regardless of their nature or content. In this paper, we present a unified experimental framework (within subjects) to analyze the effects of different sets of information (concerning social class, political orientation, or gender) on the level of giving; Our experimental design allows us to show the effect of three sets of information in terms of basic treatment without information and separate from the effect of information content. Between-subject replication in M-Turk yields results in the same direction, although the treatment effects are much weaker. These results could be relevant to any design that aims to measure the impact of different dimensions of social identity on altruism.

Business games provide an analytical tool to study strategic decisions in social interactions. Here we identify four sources of power that economic games can capture and study – asymmetric dependency, the ability to reduce dependency, the ability to punish and reward, and the use of knowledge and information. We review recent studies examining these different forms of power, highlight that the use of business games can advance our understanding of the behavioral and neurobiological underpinnings of power, and illustrate how power differences within and between groups affect cooperation, exploitation, and conflict .

Are people more generous when it comes to less money? The Ultimatum Game (UG) and the Dictator Game (DG) are often used as models for negotiation and charitable giving, respectively. Previous studies have produced conflicting results on whether UG and DG offers are lower when stakes are high, and many previous studies did not have sufficient statistical power to detect significant effects of stake size. To solve this, we performed a meta-analysis of 31 existing studies that manipulated the size of participants' endowments in the UG and DG (total 3233 participants). We hypothesized that: (1) the provider's bids would be lower at higher stakes in both games due to higher dispensing costs; and (2) bids would decrease more with stake size in the DG than in the UG, as providers do not want to risk their bid being rejected in the UG. Our results found almost no effect of stake size on UG offerings (d=0.02) and a small but significant effect of stake size on DG offerings (d=0.15). Furthermore, larger differences in stakes had little impact on effect sizes in the UG, but had a moderate impact on effect sizes in the DG. These results show that higher stakes reduce donations in the DG, albeit not greatly, and have little to no effect in the UG.

Costly punishment is believed to have arisen because it encourages cooperation and the equitable sharing of resources, but the costs associated with punishment—both to the punisher and the punished—limit the effectiveness of this enforcement system in economic interactions. Reputation can also guide decision making, but this information is not always available (eg, in interactions with strangers). In several negotiation studies, we provide evidence for an efficient and flexible “threat-based” negotiation system that can influence resource allocation without the need for costly penalties and reputation intelligence. We found that, without being prompted, participants dynamically adjusted negotiations to the negotiating partner's perceived threat potential (resource retention and aggressiveness) and made larger offers to those who appeared more threatening. These effects of perceived threat potential were strongest in participants who were most vulnerable to injury in physical competitions (women versus men and weaker men versus stronger men), despite offers being made online and anonymously to photographs of the individuals rather than in face-to-face interactions . These results may reflect an overgeneralization of a real-world threat heuristic that allows low-threat individuals to extract resources where possible while avoiding physical retaliation and harm, and high-threat individuals to appropriate larger portions of a resource through static threat tokens , rather than by physically expressing their penchant for punishment. Previously, researchers have emphasized the monetary benefits of attractiveness (the "beauty premium"), but the impact of threat was either superior, devalued, or equal to that of attractiveness.

Behavioral Processes, Volume 115, 2015, pp. 156-162

It is well established that in mammals, prenatal exposure to exogenous testosterone has a masculinizing effect on female morphology and behavior. However, fewer studies have been conducted in men on this topic, and the results are controversial. In the present study, we investigated the long-term effect of administration of extra prenatal testosterone (testosterone propionate; TP) on the morphology and behavior of adult male pet rabbits using two different control groups, untreated and vehicle-injected mothers. Unexpectedly, administration of vehicle alone had a clearly sub-masculinizing effect on all morphological and behavioral measures; lower body mass, smaller anogenital distance and chin glands, lower chin mark activity, and greater shyness. Administration of TP counteracted this effect in a dose-dependent manner, such that animals exposed to the highest dose prenatally exhibited values ​​on morphological and behavioral measures equal to, but not exceeding, those of the untreated control group. We conclude (1) that supplemental testosterone in excess of what male fetuses produce in utero does not result in increased masculinization and therefore that male fetuses are less susceptible to hormonal effects prenatally than females, and (2) that presumably stress-related effects of administration occur. Vehicle alone resulted in undermasculinization that could be restored by prenatal administration of TP. These results may partially explain the conflicting results of previous studies and demonstrate the importance of including both untreated and sham-treated (vehicle) controls in future experiments.

Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, Band 65, 2016, S. 117-120

The early characterization of humans as narrowly self-serving agents has unraveled in recent decades due to advances in the behavioral sciences. There is compelling evidence that people's preferences and choices are shaped by their relationships with others and the context of their interactions. While previous studies have shown that context can shape preferences, we examine whether people endogenously shape their own preferences by choosing their context. In a one-shot game, we examine whether dictators actively seek or avoid information about their recipient's merit. We find that four out of five dictators endogenously choose to close the social distancing gap by figuring out their recipients' earnings levels, and they act within this framework—the earners get more, the undeserving get less. We further show that the decision to seek more information about the recipient is systematic and explained by the dictator's cultural worldviews.

Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance, Band 13, 2017, S. 9-15

Guilt aversion theory has been shown to influence human behavior in many contexts. It suggests that an agent's actions are influenced by its perception of other agents' expectations, thereby associating behavior with second-order beliefs. We use a novel methodology to construct a second-order belief proxy through information disclosure in an experimental dictator game, in which we inform dictators about the transfers each of their partners received in the past. This methodology has certain advantages: in particular, it does not suffer from a false consensus effect and does not require withholding of information from subjects. Our results show that the effect of guilt aversion on giving depends on communication. In the baseline treatment, our belief proxy cannot predict transfers. However, the behavior corresponds to guilt aversion when there is communication between dictators and recipients. Hence, our results underscore the sensitivity of guilt aversion to context.

Journal of Business Psychology, Volume 45, 2014, pp. 141-153

In this post, we examine the effects ofObservation onlyAndobservation with feedbackby a third party in a one-shot dictator (DG) game. In addition to a baseline state (DG), an anonymous third party was introduced who either silently observed or observed and could provide feedback by choosing one of seven messages consisting of varying degrees of (dis)satisfaction. We found that observation combined with feedback significantly increased the dictators' suggestions, while no significant effect was foundObservation only.We conclude that appreciation by others matters only when it is related to social factors such as communication. This adds to the literature arguing that altruistic behavior helps serve other selfish (or not purely altruistic) goals such as self-reputation or social approval. This experiment also contributes to the growing literature aimed at reducing the artificiality of dictatorial game designs by increasing their practicality and external validity.

Journal of Theoretical Biology, Band 382, ​​2015, S. 64-73

The most puzzling experimental results on fairness come from the dictator game, where one of two players, the dictator, decides how a resource is shared with an anonymous player. The self-interested dictator should offer nothing to the anonymous second player, but in experimental studies dictators offer much more than nothing. We developed a multi-level selection model to explain why humans offer more than nothing in the dictator game. We show that fairness can evolve when population structure emerges from the aggregation and limited dispersal of offspring. We start with an analytical model that shows how fair behavior can benefit groups by minimizing the variability of resources within the group and thereby increasing group fitness. To examine the generality of this result, we developed an agent-based model with agents that have no information about other agents. We allowed the agents to group together and develop different levels of fairness by playing the dictator game for resource reproduction. This enabled a multi-stage selection to emerge from the spatio-temporal properties of individual agents. We found that the population structure that emerged at low population densities was most conducive to the evolution of fairness, consistent with group selection being one of the key evolutionary forces. We've also found that fairness only develops when resources are not scarce relative to agent lifespans. We conclude that the evolution of fairness may unfold under multilevel selection. Thus, our model provides a novel explanation for the results of dictator game experiments, in which participants often share a resource fairly rather than keep it all to themselves.

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Band 93, 2013, S. 337-346

We examine negotiations using ultimatum games when one party, the proposer, has private information about the size of the pie and can misrepresent that information either through untrue statements (explicit deception) or information-disclosing actions (implicit deception). Our study is the first such direct comparison between two ways people can deceive. We find that requiring an explicit statement from informed parties is more deceptive than implicitly communicating information, particularly in larger deployments. However, if the explicit statement is accompanied by a promise of truthfulness, this effect is reversed. In contrast to many previous studies, we generally observe very high rates of dishonesty.