Predicting behavior in economic games by looking through the eyes of the players.

Mellers, Barbara A.; Haselhuhn, Michael P.; Silva, José C.; Isen, Alice M.

doi:10.1037/a0020280

Cited by 42 publications

(35 citation statements)

References 80 publications

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“…The dictator game is a variation of the ultimatum game, in which "proposers" can divide a certain amount of money between themselves and "receivers," without the fear of not getting the money, due to a rejection by the receiver and without having to make strategic considerations (for further details, see Güth, 1995;Haselhuhn & Mellers, 2005;Hewig et al, 2011;Kahneman et al, 1986;Mellers et al, 2010;Weiland et al, 2012). Accordingly, it has been suggested that increased offers in the dictator game are motivated altruistically, especially if these offers can be given anonymously.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…1995; Haselhuhn & Mellers, 2005;Kahneman, Knetsch, & Thaler, 1986;Mellers et al, 2010). In the dictator game, a "proposer" has to divide a certain amount of money between herself or himself and a "receiver," whereby the "receiver" has no options to react to the division, which was made by the "proposer," in contrast to the ultimatum game (for a more detailed overlook, see, e.g., Camerer, 2003;Hewig et al, 2011).…”

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confidence: 97%

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A neural signature of fairness in altruism: A game of theta?

Rodrigues

Ulrich

Hewig

2014

Social Neuroscience

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In the dictator game, a proposer can share a certain amount of money between himself or herself and a receiver, who has no opportunity of influencing the offer. Rational choice theory predicts that dictators keep all money for themselves. But people often are offering money to receivers, despite their opportunity to maximize their own profit and therefore showing altruistic behavior. In this study, we investigated the influence of the altruism of the dictator, the anonymity of the decision and the income of the receiver on the offer made by a dictator. Additionally, we were interested in the influence of midfrontal theta activity prior to the offer, indicating the upcoming decision. The height of the offer made by the dictator was dependent on all variables investigated: Altruism of the dictator led to higher offers and income of the receiver led to higher offer the poorer the receivers are. The anonymity of the decision had two effects, depending on the altruism of the dictator, with higher offers for highly altruistic dictators, when they were not observed, and lower offers for less altruistic dictators in this condition. Finally, midfrontal theta activity predicts upcoming fair offers, maybe indicating altruistic motivation or empathy on physiological basis.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

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confidence: 97%

A neural signature of fairness in altruism: A game of theta?

Rodrigues

Ulrich

Hewig

2014

Social Neuroscience

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“…Since humans must commonly make decisions within a social context, it is important to explore the factors that influence our social decision-making. It has been found that social interactions are driven not only by logic (Camerer, 1997; Burks et al, 2003; DeSteno et al, 2010) but also by factors such as descriptive framing (Camerer, 1997; De Martino et al, 2006), fairness equilibrium (Camerer, 1997), consideration of the beliefs and desires of other players (Dubey et al, 1987; Mellers et al, 2010), perceived trustworthiness (Cox, 2004; King-Casas et al, 2005; Charness et al, 2011), and other aspects of the players' perceived character (De Dreu and McCusker, 1997). Moreover, social decision-making is influenced by our emotions (Frank, 1988; Elster, 1999).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The effect of partner-directed emotion in social exchange decision-making

Eimontaite¹,

Nicolle²,

Schindler³

et al. 2013

Front. Psychol.

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Despite the prevalence of studies examining economic decision-making as a purely rational phenomenon, common sense suggests that emotions affect our decision-making particularly in a social context. To explore the influence of emotions on economic decision-making, we manipulated opponent-directed emotions prior to engaging participants in two social exchange decision-making games (the Trust Game and the Prisoner's Dilemma). Participants played both games with three different (fictional) partners and their tendency to defect was measured. Prior to playing each game, participants exchanged handwritten “essays” with their partners, and subsequently exchanged evaluations of each essay. The essays and evaluations, read by the participant, were designed to induce either anger, sympathy, or a neutral emotional response toward the confederate with whom they would then play the social exchange games. Galvanic skin conductance level (SCL) showed enhanced physiological arousal during anger induction compared to both the neutral and sympathy conditions. In both social exchange games, participants were most likely to defect against their partner after anger induction and least likely to defect after sympathy induction, with the neutral condition eliciting intermediate defection rates. This pattern was found to be strongest in participants exhibiting low cognitive control (as measured by a Go/no-Go task). The findings indicate that emotions felt toward another individual alter how one chooses to interact with them, and that this influence depends both on the specific emotion induced and the cognitive control of the individual.

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“…These tokens are later converted into real earnings. Such economic games provide important insights into the roles of reciprocity [9], [10], reputation [10], [25], punishment [12], [13], between-group competition [26], [27], negotiation [28] and fairness norms [29] in maintaining cooperation. Experiments have also demonstrated individual [18], [30], cultural [31]–[33] and sex-based [34] differences in cooperative strategies.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploring the Effects of Working for Endowments on Behaviour in Standard Economic Games

Harrison

Mouden

2011

PLoS ONE

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In recent years, significant advances have been made in understanding the adaptive (ultimate) and mechanistic (proximate) explanations for the evolution and maintenance of cooperation. Studies of cooperative behaviour in humans invariably use economic games. These games have provided important insights into the mechanisms that maintain economic and social cooperation in our species. However, they usually rely on the division of monetary tokens which are given to participants by the investigator. The extent to which behaviour in such games may reflect behaviour in the real world of biological markets – where money must be earned and behavioural strategies incur real costs and benefits – is unclear. To provide new data on the potential scale of this problem, we investigated whether people behaved differently in two standard economic games (public goods game and dictator game) when they had to earn their monetary endowments through the completion of dull or physically demanding tasks, as compared with simply being given the endowment. The requirement for endowments to be ‘earned’ through labour did not affect behaviour in the dictator game. However, the requirement to complete a dull task reduced cooperation in the public goods game among the subset of participants who were not familiar with game theory. There has been some effort to test whether the conclusions drawn from standard, token-based cooperation games adequately reflect cooperative behaviour ‘in the wild.’ However, given the almost total reliance on such games to study cooperation, more exploration of this issue would be welcome. Our data are not unduly worrying, but they do suggest that further exploration is needed if we are to make general inferences about human behaviour from the results of structured economic games.

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Predicting behavior in economic games by looking through the eyes of the players.

Cited by 42 publications

References 80 publications

A neural signature of fairness in altruism: A game of theta?

A neural signature of fairness in altruism: A game of theta?

The effect of partner-directed emotion in social exchange decision-making

Exploring the Effects of Working for Endowments on Behaviour in Standard Economic Games

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