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A key observation in coalition formation is that bargainers who control many resources are often excluded from coalitions by bargainers who control few resources, the Strength-is-Weakness effect. We argue that this effect is contingent on whether resources provide a legitimate claim to be included in a coalition. Across three incentivized coalition experiments (n = 2745; 915 triads), three participants (player A had four resources, player B had three resources, player C had two resources) negotiated about a payoff of 90 monetary units. Depending on condition, these resources were obtained randomly, earned, or earned and proportionally linked to the payoff. Results showed player As were less included when resources were obtained randomly and more often included in coalitions when resources were earned and/or proportionally linked to the payoff. This provides evidence that the Strength-is-Weakness is contingent on the legitimacy of the resources.

This paper describes the outcome of an artefactual field experiment of group discrimination using sports fanatics. The behavior of individuals whose identity is deeply tied to a larger group or popular institution is politically important, particularly when it comes to crafting public policy. Sports fans provide a unique opportunity to study individuals who openly identify their in-group and rival groups. The study identifies within-subject group-based discrimination by quantifying the difference in dictator game takes (out of a possible $10) between fans of an individual’s self-professed team and fans of an individual’s self-professed rival. Fifty-two sports fans each participated in nine separate power-to-take dictator games with group identification spanning three levels (NCAA Division III, NCAA Division I, and professional) of football fandom. The results suggest that individuals discriminate between in-group and out-group members. The average takings ratio with same-team fans is 0.657 while the average takings ratio with other-team fans is 0.848 and the difference of 0.190 is statistically different from zero. We discuss the results in the context of team and league governance focusing on fan interactions.

Employing a two-by-two factorial design that manipulates whether dictator groups are single or mixed-sex and whether procedures are single or double-blind, we examine gender effects in a standard dictator game. No gender effect was found in any of the experimental treatments. Moreover, neither single- versus mixed-sex groups nor level of anonymity had any impact on either male or female behavior.

This paper experimentally investigated luck framing. Specifically, we analyzed the difference between being assigned an advantageous role in a distribution game and being assigned the same role while being explicitly told that you were lucky to be in that favorable position. We tested this difference by implementing a dictator game and a no-veto-cost ultimatum game. We observed that: a) dictators transferred larger amounts in the game when they were explicitly told they were lucky to be the dictator compared to dictators who did not receive this message, and b) responders in the no-veto-cost ultimatum game who were explicitly told they were lucky to be in that role were significantly less likely to reject a particular offer compared to responders in the game who did not receive this message. The combination of these results is consistent with the hypothesis that people are more likely to behave in a more prosocial and egalitarian manner when they are reminded that they are lucky to be in a particular position.

The present research was motivated by a prior study, where several wallets, each containing a photo of either a baby, a puppy, a family, or an elderly couple, were scattered across a city in the United Kingdom. Most of the wallets containing a photo of a baby were returned compared with less than one-third of the wallets containing a photo of an elderly couple. To investigate further, in a series of three studies we examined, using a pseudo online version of the dictator game, possible subtle cues supporting prosocial behaviour by manipulating the type of avatar used by the recipient of the donation made by the “dictator.” Overall, it emerged that participants showed significantly higher levels of generosity towards babies and older people, supporting the notion that perceptions of vulnerability and need drive prosocial behaviour.

The authors examine the effects of money priming and solidarity on individual behavior in three simple games: dictator, ultimatum, and prisoner's dilemma game. In three consecutive experiments, they use two different money treatments and two neutral (control) treatments. Additionally, they vary the strength of social ties between participants by conducting experiments with students from a military university and a regular university. Although the priming procedure is sufficient to remind people of the concept of money, it is not sufficient to induce systematically different behavior of the treatment groups compared to the control groups. They find significant differences between groups with strong and weak social ties, even without activating the idea of group affiliation. They discuss various explanations of why the results seem to contradict previous research on money priming.

Some people willingly risk or give up their lives for something they deeply believe in, for instance standing up to a dictator. A good example of this are members of the White Rose student resistance group, who rebelled against the Nazi regime and paid for it with their lives. I argue that when the cause is good, such risky activities (and even deaths themselves) can contribute to meaning in life in its different forms – meaning-as-mattering, meaning-as-purpose, and meaning-as-intelligibility. Such cases highlight the importance of integrity, or living up to one's commitments, in meaningful living, or dying, as it may be, as well as the risk involved in commitment, since if you die for a bad cause, you have only harmed yourself. However, if leading a more rather than less meaningful life benefits rather than harms you, there are possible scenarios in which you yourself are better off dying for a good cause than living a longer moderately happy life. This presents a version of a well-known puzzle: what, then, makes dying for a cause a self-sacrifice, as it usually seems to be? I sketch some possible answers, and critically examine relevant work in empirical psychology.

THE AIM OF THE PAPER Fairness and other-regarding preferences arguably are defining factors of the experiments conducted with dictator games, which provide an opportunity to examine the components of pro-sociality. Our analysis focuses on the experimental results suggesting that offerings and expectations are based on egalitarian behavior. Besides that, we attempted to explore the age-specific characteristics of hypothetical dictator games. METHODOLOGY We used survey data of an age-representative sample to measure how the results support previous research findings stating that generosity and its age-related aspects play a crucial role in the formation of human decisions and expectations. MOST IMPORTANT RESULTS Our results confirmed the dominance of hyper-fair behavior. However, significant differences were found across the dictator game variants in terms of the amounts of money marked. Subjects in cases of charity-offering, recipient-offering, and expectation give lower amounts on average compared to recipient-offerings and fairness, respectively. In contrast, the marked amounts are higher for recipient-offerings than for expectations with the absence of any significant age-effect. Acknowledgements: The project was financed by the European Social Fund: Comprehensive Development for Implementing Smart Specialization Strategies at the University of Pecs (EFOP-3.6.1.- 16-2016-00004). Declarations of interest: none.

This paper reports on an experimental test of the acceptability of the Principle of Accountability. This is a principle of social justice, and states, “individuals should be rewarded for factors under their control […], but not for factors outside their control” (Cappelen and Tungodden (2009)). We specifically ask for acceptability of theprincipleunderlying it, rather than for particular rewards in particular instances. We carry out the test with both an Internal and an External Dictator, conducting a laboratory experiment with a total of 240 subjects. We find that there is broad, but not overwhelming support for the Principle. When the Principle is internally inconsistent no clear preference emerges, which is not surprising.

To find out if third-party fairness maintenance is affected by group relationships, we divided participants into three groups and had them play a game of third-party fairness maintenance, in which a third party chooses between keeping (not intervening), punishing, or compensating, when the other players face unfair dictator game results. Results show that when faced with in-group unfair events, the third party tended to choose keeping or compensating strategies, and to opt not to intervene in the unfair events of the out-group. This tendency was stronger when both the dictator and the recipient belonged to the same out-group. In addition, there was intergroup bias in maintenance of third-party fairness. When the violator was an in-group member, the third party tended to use keep and compensate strategies, and chose to punish when facing violation by the out-group. Our findings illustrate the influence of group relationships on third-party fairness maintenance.

Economics games such as the Dictator and Public Goods Games have been widely used to measure ethnic bias in political science and economics. Yet these tools may fail to measure bias as intended because they are vulnerable to self-presentational concerns and/or fail to capture bias rooted in more automatic associative and affective reactions. We examine a set of misattribution-based approaches, adapted from social psychology, that may sidestep these concerns. Participants in Nairobi, Kenya completed a series of common economics games alongside versions of these misattribution tasks adapted for this setting, each designed to detect bias toward noncoethnics relative to coethnics. Several of the misattribution tasks show clear evidence of (expected) bias, arguably reflecting differences in positive/negative affect and heightened threat perception toward noncoethnics. The Dictator and Public Goods Games, by contrast, are unable to detect any bias in behavior toward noncoethnics versus coethnics. We conclude that researchers of ethnic and other biases may benefit from including misattribution-based procedures in their tool kits to widen the set of biases to which their investigations are sensitive.

We explore how risk preferences affect pro-social behavior under uncertainty. We analyze a modified dictator game in which the dictator can, by reducing her own sure payoff, increase the odds that an unknown recipient wins a lottery. We first augment a standard social preferences model with reference-dependent risk attitudes and then test the model’s predictions for the dictator’s giving behavior using a laboratory experiment. Consistent with the predictions of the model, we find that the relationship between giving behavior and a giver’s loss aversion is mediated by the strength of the giver’s pro-social preferences. Among more (less) pro-social dictators, an increase in loss aversion increases (decreases) the likelihood that a dictator contributes to a recipient.

Our research speaks to the ongoing debate over the extent and severity of partisan political divisions in American society. We employ behavioral experiments to probe for affective polarization using dictator, trust, and public goods games with party identification treatments. We find that subjects who identify politically with the Democratic or Republican Party and ideologically as liberals and conservatives display stronger affective biases than politically unaffiliated and ideological moderates. Partisan subjects are less altruistic, less trusting, and less likely to contribute to a mutually beneficial public good when paired with members of the opposing party. Compared to other behavioral studies, our research suggests increasing levels of affective polarization in the way Americans relate to one another politically, bordering on the entrenched divisions one commonly sees in conflict or post-conflict societies. To overcome affective polarization, our research points to inter-group contact as a mechanism for increasing trust and bridging political divides.

In a laboratory experiment we investigate whether bad behavior in anonymous environments results from more lenient social norms or a reduction in the size of the role played by social norms in decision‐making. We elicit social norms in two dictator games with different levels of anonymity, estimate subjects' willingness‐to‐pay to adhere to norms, and test for treatment differences in each factor. Overall, it is a large reduction in the role played by social norms, which results in more unfair dictator choices when anonymous. Interestingly, however, females find making an unfair decision less acceptable when the dictator is unidentified. (JEL A13, C91, Z10)

The dictator game (DG) is one of the simplest and most commonly used experimental games for examining economic and altruistic behaviors. Altruism became crucial in research on decisions in experimental and behavioral economy. This study extends existing research on the relationship between cognitive performance, measured by the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) and the DG, taking into account such factors as gender and declared religiosity. The research assesses whether gender and declared religiosity affect altruistic behavior measured in the DG’s payoffs. 511 participants (master’s students in economics) were asked to respond to six types of DGs and the CRT7 test. Correlation analysis, descriptive statistics, student t-tests, the Mann-Whitney test and Tobit regression analysis were conducted. Cognitive reflection was positively correlated with rational (selfish) behavior in the DG. Those dictators who scored high on the CRT (reflective dictators) kept more money for themselves than those who achieved lower scores on the CRT (altruistic, impulsive dictators). The results confirmed a distinct, inequity aversion attitude among altruistic, impulsive dictators and a selfish attitude among reflective dictators. The dictator’s payoff was significantly related to the gender and declared religiosity of the participants. Women were more concerned about equal distribution of income than men (on average they shared 30% more than men) and religious agents shared 20%–30% more than non-believers.

We offer a novel rational explanation for cults of personality. Participation in a cult of personality is psychologically costly whenever it involves preference falsification, with the costs varying across individuals. We highlight two characteristics associated with lower individual costs of preference falsification: (i) loyalty to the regime and (ii) unscrupulousness. Different characteristics might serve the regime better in different roles. Using a simple formal screening model, we demonstrate that one’s participation in a cult of personality improves the dictator’s personnel decisions under a wide variety of circumstances. Decisions are most improved when subordinates’ characteristics that better enable cult participation are correspondingly valued by dictators. Dictators who can manipulate the costs that cult participants pay find it easiest to ensure that correspondence. Our model also highlights the importance to dictators of not believing their own propaganda, and their need to offer increasingly extreme acts of cult participation as old acts become normalized.

International audience; This paper reports the results of dictator experiments in which the context is varied between a loss and gain frame. In some treatments, individuals have the possibility to sort and self-select the frame they prefer. We demonstrate that higher shares are transferred to the recipient in the loss frame compared to the gain frame when the situation occurs naturally, while the opposite result holds when the participants provoke themselves the situation. Our main result can be attributed primarily to a gender effect, i.e. female participants acting more generously in loss frames.

The aims of this study were twofold, to: (1) examine the behavior displayed by participants who expected to be nominated for donor roles in dictator games wherein initial endowments of players are determined by lottery and (2) investigate the conduct of donors who were confident in their good fortune in relation to their power as they redistributed the rewards they had gained. Results from a dictator game in which a donor is accorded the absolute power to redistribute initial income and a random dictator game in which both a donor and a recipient declare their redistributive preferences and one of them is selected randomly by a computer were compared. Confident donors made more self-serving redistribution decisions than did unconfident donors in both games, but the difference was clearer in the dictator game. In relation to their preferences exhibited before being informed of their roles, confident donors decreased their redistribution amounts after discovering their roles; the decrements in the dictator game were conspicuously larger than those in the random dictator game. In short, confident donors were greedier than unconfident donors; the difference became more pronounced when their redistributive power was unconditional even though their confidence had no rational basis.

Recent studies in experimental economics have documented that communication encourages individuals' altruism and charitable giving in various contexts. Building upon these findings, this paper incorporates and studies the influence of power differences in communication on giving behavior. We conducted a variant of dictator game experiments where a dictator is explicitly allowed to ignore a recipient's message before deciding the split. Power differences between players varied across different treatments on provision of information regarding the dictator’s reception of the message and framing on the property right of the endowment. We find evidence that dictators tend to be more generous toward recipients' messages when recipients cannot verify whether dictators have read the message. We interpret these behaviors as a demonstration of psychological mechanisms of individuals being more generous to less powerful counterparts. However, recipient behaviors imply that they have failed at anticipating dictators behaviors, as they asked for more when they had more power and asked less otherwise.

Research on altruistic behaviour and associated anticipatory beliefs, as well as related gender differences, is limited. Using data from Chowdhury and Jeon, who vary a common show-up fee and incentivize recipients to anticipate the amount given in a dictator game, we find that the show-up fee has a positive effect on dictator-giving for both genders. While female dictators are more generous than males, male recipients anticipate higher amounts than the amount male dictators give. As the show-up fee increases, the female dictators become a more generous social type, whereas males do not show this effect. There is no gender difference in anticipation about dictator social type by the recipients.

We conducted two replication studies of Andreoni and Miller’s (2002) modified dictator game study, which revealed that participants’ altruistic decisions were consistent with the notion of utility maximization. The two studies (Study 1 with small stake sizes and Study 2 with large stake sizes) included 11 modified dictator games, in which participants allocated a fixed number of tokens between themselves and their recipient. In eight of the 11 games, each token’s value was different for each player. In Study 1 (N = 78), 85% of participants did not violate the generalized axiom of revealed preference (GARP) throughout the 11 games. In Study 2 (N = 58), 81% of participants did not violate GARP. These results suggest that participants’ decisions were largely consistent with utility maximization. Following Andreoni and Miller’s analysis, we classified all participants (except one anomalous case) into the Selfish, Leontief (egalitarian), and Perfect Substitutes (utilitarian) groups. The majority of participants were classified into either the Leontief or Prefect Substitutes groups (i.e., non-selfish groups).

In this study, we implemented a dictator game experiment to examine how the increase of the public characteristic in an impure public good affects individuals’ prosocial behaviour. A within‐subject design was used in the experiment. The dictator game was repeated six times with an impure public good introduced in four of them. We observe that the increase of the public characteristic in an impure public good partly crowds out individuals’ subsequent donations, which could be explained by a seemingly ‘mental accounting’ mental process. In addition, we also find that the selfish behaviour of individuals in dictator games with impure public goods, to some extent, has an inertia influence on their subsequent donations when the impure public good is removed.

It has been argued that guilt aversion (the desire to meet others’ expectations) and the social norm compliance (the desire to act similarly to other individuals in the same situation) are important drivers of human behavior. However, as we show in a theoretical model, these two motives are empirically indistinguishable when only one signal (either the expectation of a person affected by the choice or a signal about the descriptive norm) is revealed as each of these signals transmit information on the other benchmark. We address this problem by running an experiment in which signals for both benchmarks are revealed simultaneously. We find that both types of information affect dictator transfers in a one-shot game, yet the information about the behavior of others has a stronger effect than the disclosed recipient’s expectation. The effect of the recipient’s expectation is non-monotonic and becomes negative for very high expectations. We provide further evidence for the importance of guilt aversion in a second experiment where we display the recipient’s expectation and the expectation of a randomly picked recipient of another dictator.

We join a growing body of literature suggesting that the languages people speak influence their decision-making. We tested whether dropping the first-person pronoun “I” affects prosocial behavior in a dictator game-like setting. To this end, we conducted an online randomized, incentivized experiment with a socially representative sample of 2,000 Japanese respondents. We provide compelling causal evidence that pronoun-dropping reduces pro-sociality. Given that our results provide little empirical support for previous research findings linking first-person pronoun use and lower pro-sociality, we prescribe caution in using languages as a proxy for culture in several cross-country empirical studies in economics. Accepted version

According to Turnbull's 1972 ethnography The Mountain People, the Ik of Uganda had a culture of selfishness that made them uncooperative. His claims contrast with two widely accepted principles in evolutionary biology, that humans cooperate on larger scales than other species and that culture is an important facilitator of such cooperation. We use recently collected data to examine Ik culture and its influence on Ik behaviour. Turnbull's observations of selfishness were not necessarily inaccurate but they occurred during a severe famine. Cooperation re-emerged when people once again had enough resources to share. Accordingly, Ik donations in unframed Dictator Games are on par with average donations in Dictator Games played by people around the world. Furthermore, Ik culture includes traits that encourage sharing with those in need and a belief in supernatural punishment of selfishness. When these traits are used to frame Dictator Games, the average amounts given by Ik players increase. Turnbull's claim that the Ik have a culture of selfishness can be rejected. Cooperative norms are resilient, and the consensus among scholars that humans are remarkably cooperative and that human cooperation is supported by culture can remain intact.

Long-term thinking and voluntary resource sharing are two distinctive traits of human nature. Across three experiments (N=1,082), I propose a causal connection: Sometimes people are generous because they think about the future. Participants were randomly assigned to either focus on the present or the future and then made specific decisions in hypothetical scenarios. In Study 1 (N=200), future-focused participants shared more money in a public dictator game than present-focused participants (+39%), and they were willing to donate more money to charity (+61%). Study 2 (N=410) replicated the positive effect of future-focus on dictator giving when the choice was framed as public (+36%), but found no such effect when the choice was framed as private. That is, focusing on the future made participants more generous only when others would know their identity. Study 3 was a high-powered and pre-registered replication of Study 1 (N=472), including a few extensions. Once again, future-focused participants gave more money to charity in a public donation scenario (+40%), and they were more likely to volunteer for the same charity (+17%). As predicted, the effect was mediated by reputational concern, indicating that future-orientation can make people more generous because it also makes them more attuned to the social consequences of their choices. Taken together, the results suggest that focusing on the future promotes reputation-based generosity. By stimulating voluntary resource sharing, a central function of human foresight might be to support cooperation in groups and society.

© 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Whether those who believe in God are more prosocial has been a long debated topic. Here we shed new light on this question by examining giving in incentivized Dictator Games where no mention of religion was made, played online with anonymous strangers. Study 1 (N = 15,827) found a significant correlation between belief and giving, r =.122 (robust to demographics). Study 2 (N = 2334) included the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) to examine whether this relationship could be explained by intuitive cognitive style driving both belief and prosociality. Study 2 replicated the correlation between belief and giving, r =.106, and found CRT to be negatively correlated with both belief, r = −.229, and giving, r = −.174. Critically, the relationship between belief and giving was reduced by 34% when controlling for CRT; and also adding basic demographics rendered the relationship non-significant. Our results suggest that—at least in this task and population—believers do show greater prosociality, but more due to intuitive cognitive style than belief per se.

Third-party punishment occurs when a perpetrator of a transgression is punished by another person who was not directly affected by the transgression (i.e. a third-party). Given gratitude's demonstrated ability to enhance both cooperation and the value people place on future-rewards, its capacity to increase third-party punishment - a phenomenon theorised to increase future cooperative behaviour - was investigated. In two experiments, participants were randomly assigned to experience one of three emotional states (i.e. gratitude, happiness, or neutrality) prior to making decisions about how much of a previous financial endowment they would spend to punish a person who transgressed against another at differing degrees within the context of a dictator game. As expected, punishment expenditures decreased for all participants as a dictator's decision became fairer. Of primary interest, however, participants who felt grateful, as compared to those who felt neutral or happy, engaged in significantly more third-party punishment across dictator splits that were not altruistic in nature.

In a laboratory experiment, I test whether guilt aversion, i.e., a preference to fulfill the expectations of others, plays out more strongly if agents share an induced social identity. Participants play a dictator game in which they can condition their amount sent on recipients’ beliefs. Dictators either play with a recipient from their own group (ingroup treatment) or from the other group (outgroup treatment). I find that the positive influence of second-order beliefs on how much a dictator sends is stronger in the ingroup treatment. However, the way dictators react to very high expectations does not differ significantly between treatments. In contrast to previous work I do not find that amounts sent are an inversely u-shaped function of recipients’ expectations. Rather, and independently of the treatment, participants tend to ignore very high expectations.

We investigate whether the concept of guilt aversion in economics is related to the psychological characterization of the same phenomenon. For trust games and dictator games we report correlations between the guilt sensitivity measured within a framework of psychological games most common in economics and the guilt sensitivity measured using a questionnaire common in psychology (TOSCA-3). We find that the two measures correlate well and significantly in the two settings.

Andreoni and Bernheim (2009) consider a variant of the dictator game in which a recipient does not know whether an allocation decision was made by a dictator or by an exogenous force, called “nature”. They find that as the likelihood of nature's intervention increased, more subjects mimicked the nature's move. We replicate their experiment, and examine a new treatment in which a recipient is always informed about whether a dictator or nature made a decision. We find that (i) many dictators’ decisions were affected by nature's intervention even when the recipient was informed of whether the dictator or nature had made the decision, which suggests that the intervention altered not only the incentive to signal one's willingness to comply with the social norm but also the social norm itself (i.e., the perception of an appropriate action), but (ii) still dictators’ behavior under the two treatments differed significantly, which suggests that the audience effect also matters greatly.

Although disorders of personality are associated with a range of interpersonal difficulties, little is known about how knowledge of a partner's personality pathology affects behavior in bargaining situations. We asked study participants to play two economic games with virtual confederates. Participants were told that the confederates had been interviewed and were now portrayed using brief vignettes. The vignettes described one of eight DSM-5 personality disorders and a control (no personality pathology) vignette. In Experiment 1, participants played either the role of proposer (specifying offers) or responder (specifying minimum acceptable offers) in an Ultimatum game. In the role of proposer, participants made lower offers to the avoidant, histrionic, antisocial, narcissistic, schizotypal, dependent, and borderline vignettes in comparison to the control vignette. In the role of responder, participants showed no differences among vignettes with respect to responder minimum acceptable offers. To isolate the effects of fairness or altruism, we conducted a second experiment in which participants played the role of allocator in a Dictator game. Participants made lower allocations to vignettes depicting schizoid, histrionic, antisocial, narcissistic, dependent, and borderline personality disorders compared to the control vignette. Taken together, these findings suggest that knowledge of personality pathology plays a role in bargaining situations.

In this research, we examine how cooperation emerges and develops in sequential dyadic interactions when the initial interaction varies in strategic considerations (i.e., fear of partner rejection) or potential gossip by one's partner that may affect subsequent interactions. In a lab experiment involving real-time interactions (N = 240) across 39 sessions, participants acted in different roles (i.e., Person A, B, and C) in two different games-Person A was first assigned to allocate an amount of resource to Person B in a dictator game or an ultimatum game. Afterward, Person C interacted with Person A (i.e., trustee) as a trustor in a trust game. Prior to their decisions, participants (a) learned that Person B could gossip by sending evaluations about Person A's behavior to Person C prior to the trust game or (b) did not receive this information. Findings replicate previous research showing that potential gossip by one's partner greatly increases cooperation that is revealed in the resources allocated to the partner. Yet, compared to the dictator game, the presence of strategic considerations in the ultimatum game does not significantly enhance cooperation, and even makes people less likely to reciprocate others' behavior in the subsequent interaction. Interestingly, when there is no gossip, those who have played the ultimatum game, compared to the dictator game, are more trusted by others but do not vary in reciprocity in the subsequent interaction. However, when there is gossip, those who have played the dictator game, compared to the ultimatum game, are more trusted and also more likely to reciprocate others' behavior in the subsequent interaction. These findings imply that gossip invariably promotes cooperation across strategic and non-strategic situations, but the potential rejection by one's partner weakly promotes cooperation, and even undermines future cooperation especially when paired with reputation sharing opportunities. We discuss the implications of these findings for implementing reputation systems that can promote and maintain cooperation cost-effectively.

Human society has evolved to allow third parties-the court system, parents or other societal arbitrators-to punish norm violators and compensate victims. Few studies explore the effect of stress or time pressure on a third-party judge. Under time pressure, people will likely show a more instinctual reaction or judgment style. We investigated third-party punishment and compensation within the context of unfairly shared losses and gains in a dictator game under time pressure. Our results show that under no time pressure, participants were inclined to punish dictators who unfairly split windfall gains; however, participants chose to compensate victims more than punish the norm-violating dictators in the context of unfairly shared losses. With added time pressure, third-parties were disposed to inflict punishment upon the dictator in both the gain and loss contexts-punishment became the action of choice. Our results shed light on the way observed behavior and stress affect social cognition and decision making in the context of altruistic social interventions and the enforcement of social norms.

We examine the impact of perceived worthiness and financial self‐interest on charitable giving. Both participants and recipients come from a low‐income, predominantly African‐American community in the United States. To examine this issue, we introduce a “Comparative Dictator Game,” where participants make dictator allocations for four possible recipients, each with different characteristics. We find higher charitable giving toward more “worthy” (i.e., disabled, females who are head of household, and individuals with more children) recipients when individuals donate money to different recipients. Additionally, subjects then select their preferred recipient/allocation. When only one recipient must be selected for a donation, individuals select recipients to whom they provided smaller donations and recipients with children. The results highlight the trade‐off between a desire to engage in philanthropy, supporting those who are deserving, and financial self‐interest.

The social stigma against the payoff-maximizing strategy in dictator games is being accepted by more researchers as the most accurate rationalization for the divergence between classical economic theory and laboratory behavior in this setting. By constructing a fake entitlement treatment, where dictator role assignment was purely random, but masqueraded in a way that was open for interpretation, we investigate whether social norm compliance is an inclination or obligation in dictator experiments. We provide compelling evidence that dictators are not predisposed to seek adherence with prevailing social norms, but instead, interpreted the setting to serve their own self-interest.

Over the past decade, the world has faced an unprecedented refugee crisis. The large number of incoming refugees represents a challenge for host societies and its citizens triggering reactions from a supportive welcome to brusque rejection and hostile behavior toward refugees. In a pre-registered study, we investigated factors that could promote altruistic behavior in fully incentivized one-shot Dictator Game toward various receiver groups including refugees. We find that host citizens behave more altruistically toward refugees and other receiver groups if they (a) share a local identity with them (i.e., live in the same city), and (b) perceive them to be close (to the self) and warm-hearted. Moreover, citizens that are (c) generally more prosocial and hold a more left-wing political orientation are more willing to give. Unexpectedly, from a theoretical point of view, altruistic giving toward refugees was not influenced in the predicted direction by a shared student identity, competition and perceived income differences (although the latter effect was significant when considering all receiver groups). For shared student identity we even observe a reduction of altruistic behavior, while the opposite effect was predicted. We discuss implications for public policies for successful refugee helping and integration.

Recent research shows that how we respond to other social actors depends on what sort of mind we ascribe to them. In a comparative manner, we observed how perceived minds of agents shape people’s behavior in the dictator game, ultimatum game, and negotiation against artificial agents. To do so, we varied agents’ minds on two dimensions of the mind perception theory:agency(cognitive aptitude) andpatiency(affective aptitude) via descriptions and dialogs. In our first study, agents with emotional capacity garnered more allocations in the dictator game, but in the ultimatum game, agents’ described agency and affective capacity, both led to greater offers. In the second study on negotiation, agents ascribed with low-agency traits earned more points than those with high-agency traits, though the negotiation tactic was the same for all agents. Although patiency did not impact game points, participants sent more happy and surprise emojis and emotionally valenced messages to agents that demonstrated emotional capacity during negotiations. Further, our exploratory analyses indicate that people related only to agents with perceived affective aptitude across all games. Both perceived agency and affective capacity contributed to moral standing after dictator and ultimatum games. But after negotiations, only agents with perceived affective capacity were granted moral standing. Manipulating mind dimensions of machines has differing effects on how people react to them in dictator and ultimatum games, compared to a more complex economic exchange like negotiation. We discuss these results, which show that agents are perceived not only as social actors, but as intentional actors through negotiations, in contrast with simple economic games.

The motivation for discussing representations of the Soviet Union in Polish reporting has been the desire to examine how the greatest Polish reporters grappled with such an important political and social problem. For writers and historians, Soviet communism posed a difficult challenge, which raised many questions: how to avoid stereotyping, shoulder the burden of the past, and navigate the constraints of censorship of the communist period. How not to join the naive voices of some Western intellectuals enchanted by Soviet propaganda (a problem faced by Wankowicz and Pruszynski)? The article presents the use of individual reporting techniques and artistic devices visible in the observations and the reflections formulated by Polish reporters.The research material has been arranged chronologically. Written with artistry, Wankowicz’s reports from the 1930s record his fascination with the newly emerging workers’ state, but they also document many disturbing phenomena, contrasts and lies. His particularly critical observations had to be later removed or mitigated by the writer in the post-war editions. These interesting self-censoring changes are examined in detail in this article. Pruszynski’s texts are a valuable supplement to the complicated relations between, on the one hand, Sikorski’s government and the main Allies, and on the other hand, Stalin’s state. They also present the creation of the Polish army in the USSR. At the same time, they are an artful and expressive picture of a brave nation led by a charismatic dictator (the texts were written before the discovery of the Katyn massacre!). Although dependent on her party bosses, Hanna Krall, a reporter from a satellite state, managed to construct an authentic representation of the life of individuals in the Soviet state. She achieved this thanks to her style of ‘mundane realism’ and the use of microanalysis as a technique. However, she did not manage to avoid the optimism that was obligatory at the time with regard to the entire system (especially the reforms initiated by Khrushchev and Brezhnev). Ryszard Kapuścinski took up Soviet themes in numerous works over many years; his reports from ‘exotic’ Asian republics and his depiction of the cultural melting pot of the former USSR are particularly interesting. He was also given the opportunity to describe perestroika and the final collapse of the red empire; he reported also on how the foundations of the new Russia were built. The article is based on the following claim: the greatest reporters, who employed a variety of writing techniques, encountered serious – objective and subjective – difficulties in representing the dynamic spectrum of transformations and perspectives which communism brought about for the USSR itself and also for Poland. The effects of their reporting work are thus varied, and the imprint of the times is visible in them.The text is situated within the disciplines of social communication and media studies, literary studies and modern history. The methodologies used in the article include text analysis and interpretation, stylistic, genre and comparative analysis, thematic and historical research.

Contains fulltext : 234347.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access) Psychological studies have demonstrated that expectations can have substantial effects on choice behavior, although the role of expectations on social decision making in particular has been relatively unexplored. To broaden our knowledge, we examined the role of expectations on decision making when interacting with new game partners and then also in a subsequent interaction with the same partners. To perform this, 38 participants played an Ultimatum Game (UG) in the role of responders and were primed to expect to play with two different groups of proposers, either those that were relatively fair (a tendency to propose an equal split - the high expectation condition) or unfair (with a history of offering unequal splits - the low expectation condition). After playing these 40 UG rounds, they then played 40 Dictator Games (DG) as allocator with the same set of partners. The results showed that expectations affect UG decisions, with a greater proportion of unfair offers rejected from the high as compared to the low expectation group, suggesting that players utilize specific expectations of social interaction as a behavioral reference point. Importantly, this was evident within subjects. Interestingly, we also demonstrated that these expectation effects carried over to the subsequent DG. Participants allocated more money to the recipients of the high expectation group as well to those who made equal offers and, in particular, when the latter were expected to behave unfairly, suggesting that people tend to forgive negative violations and appreciate and reward positive violations. Therefore, both the expectations of others' behavior and their violations play an important role in subsequent allocation decisions. Together, these two studies extend our knowledge of the role of expectations in social decision making. 17 p.

Elections affect the division of resources in society and are occasions for political elites to make appeals rooted in voters' self-interest. Hence, elections may erode altruistic norms and cause people to behave more selfishly. We test this intuition using Dictator Games in a lab-in-the-field experiment involving a sample of more than 1000 individuals in Kenya and Tanzania. We adopt two approaches. First, we experimentally prime participants to think about the upcoming or most recent elections and find that this priming treatment reduces how much money participants are willing to give to other players. Second, we compare results obtained across lab rounds in Kenya taking place right before the country's 2013 national elections and eight months prior, and find that selfishness is greater in the lab round more proximate to the election. Our results suggest that elections may affect social behavior in important—and previously unrecognized—ways.

We conduct an experiment using sequential dictator games where two dictators give serially to a common recipient. In the treatment conditions, the second dictator knows the outcome in the first game and thus the endowment of the recipient. Across treatment conditions, we alter the mechanism that determines the recipient’s endowment by replacing the first game dictator by a disinterested third party or a computer. We find that a negative relationship exists between the endowment of the recipient and giving of the second dictator only when a human with self-interest performs the allocation in the first game. Additionally, we find some evidence that dictators in the second game give less than first game dictators and no significant difference in average second game dictator giving across conditions.

We study discrimination in prosocial domains against sexual minorities using a sharing (dictator) game in an online experiment, where these individuals have the opportunity to signal their identity. We find that political affiliations matter: Republican heterosexual individuals are less generous to others who are perceived to be sexual minorities, while their Democratic counterparts are slightly more generous. This is robust to alternative specifications and cannot be explained by perceptions about the recipient's political leaning. Moreover, women, but not men, are less likely to signal their sexual minority status when they are aware of the potential payoff implications of their decisions.

We build and estimate a signaling game of xenophobic behaviors to understand to what extent, individual racial animus, perceived unacceptance of racial animus, and the stigma and honor determine xenophobic behaviors in equilibrium. We estimate the model using our newly collected survey data about anti-Chinese xenophobia in the US during the COVID-19 pandemic. We measure xenophobic behaviors from support for xenophobic institutions and relative altruism for a Chinese immigrant during dictator games. To identify racial animus and perceived unacceptance of racial animus, we use novel survey instruments and a factor model to account for measurement errors. We validate our estimates by comparing our model predictions with the causal estimates obtained from the information Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT) implemented during the survey. We found raising perceived unacceptance of racial animus is more effective than reducing racial animus to decrease most xenophobic behaviors we consider. Also, COVID-19 self infection increases xenophobic behaviors in the short run but reduces such behaviors in the long run due to increased reputational gain when abstaining from xenophobic action. Finally, we found the FOX news viewership increases most xenophobic behaviors both in the short run and in the long run.

This project was conducted while Ernesto Mesa-Vázquez was visiting Universidad Loyola Andalucia. He wants to particularly thank Pablo Brañas-Garza and Diego Jorrat for continued guidance and assessment with the experimental design. Álvaro Núñez-Bermúdez and the faculty members of the Economics and Business Sciences department at the University of Seville were very helpful in providing assistance for running the experiment. The paper has benefited from comments and suggestions provided by Maria Paz Espinosa, Giuseppe Attanassi, José Enrique Vila, Iván Arribas, Marco Faillo, Cristina Borra and participants at the Loyola Behavioral Lab and the Early Career Researchers in Experimental Economics Workshop (ECREEW) organized by the Red Española de Economía Experimental y del Comportamiento. Members of the ESA community were very helpful pointing out to relevant papers to our research. Special thanks to Daniel Müller, Michael Kurschilgen, Sabine Erika Kröger, Daniel Zizzo, Praveen Kujal, Paul J. Halevy, Michal Krawczyk and Matthias Greiff for their references and stimulating discussion. Finally, we acknowledge financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Economics and Competition under the project ECO2016- 75575-R (A. Urbano) and the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities under projects PID2019-110790RB-I00 (A. Urbano) and PGC2018-097875-A-I00 (Ismael Rodriguez-Lara); and the Generalitat Valenciana, Spain under the Excellence Program Prometeo 2019/095 (A. Urbano). Funding for open access charge: Universidad de Granada/CBUA. The usual disclaimers apply., We show that generosity is affected when we vary the level of role uncertainty, i.e., the probability that the dictator’s decision will be implemented. We also show that framing matters for generosity in that subjects are less generous when they are told that their choices will be implemented with a certain probability, compared with a setting in which they are told that their choices will not be implemented with certain probability, Spanish Government ECO2016-75575-R, Spanish Ministry of Economics and Competition PID2019-110790RB-I00 PGC2018-097875-A-I00, Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, Generalitat Valenciana 2019/095, Universidad de Granada/CBUA

The previous research shows that delaying a reward in the dictator game contributes to less generous offers. If the reason for such results is temporal discounting, it can be expected that the effect of delay would be stronger for persons with a higher discounting rate, as well as the analogous pattern should occur in the ultimatum game. The participants of our study took decisions in the dictator and ultimatum game as proposers and responders. We manipulated delay of a reward (from immediate to in 5 years) and social distance (from the closest person to known only by sight). We observed the expected but weak interaction effect between delay and temporal discounting. However, the correlational analyses did not confirm the significant relationship between temporal discounting and decisions taken in dictator and ultimatum games. Moreover, the offers decline with the social distance, both in the dictator and ultimatum game. However, the social distance does not affect the value of the accepted offer in the ultimatum game. Such a discrepancy between donors’ behaviour and beneficiaries’ expectations may form a subtle but significant failure of the real-world donation markets.

Most recommender systems propose items to individual users. However, in domains such as tourism, people often consume items in groups rather than individually. Different individual preferences in such a group can be difficult to resolve, and often compromises need to be made. Social choice strategies can be used to aggregate the preferences of individuals. We evaluated two explainable modified preference aggregation strategies in a between-subject study (n=200), and compared them with two baseline strategies for groups that are also explainable, in two scenarios: high divergence (group members with different travel preferences) and low divergence (group members with similar travel preferences). Generally, all investigated aggregation strategies performed well in terms of perceived individual and group satisfaction and perceived fairness. The results also indicate that participants were sensitive to a dictator-based strategy, which affected both their individual and group satisfaction negatively (compared to the other strategies).

The seemingly rampant economic selfishness suggested by many recent corporate scandals is at odds with empirical results from behavioural economics, which demonstrate high levels of prosocial behaviour in bilateral interactions and low levels of dishonest behaviour. We design an experimental setting, the ‘Big Robber’ game, where a ‘robber’ can obtain a large personal gain by appropriating the earnings of a large group of ‘victims’. In a large laboratory experiment (N = 640), more than half of all robbers took as much as possible and almost nobody declined to rob. However, the same participants simultaneously displayed standard, predominantly prosocial behaviour in Dictator, Ultimatum and Trust games. Thus, we provide direct empirical evidence showing that individual selfishness in high-impact decisions affecting a large group is compatible with prosociality in bilateral low-stakes interactions. That is, human beings can simultaneously be generous with others and selfish with large groups. Alos-Ferrer et al. introduce the Big Robber game to study selfish and generous behaviour within the same person. Most people were willing to steal half the earnings of a large group if their personal gain exceeded €100, but the same people were generous towards individuals.