Sharing Money With Humans Versus Computers: On the Role of Honesty-Humility and (Non-)Social Preferences

Abstract

Does giving behavior in economic games reflect true prosocial preferences or is it due to confusion? Research showing that trait Honesty-Humility accounts for giving behavior suggests the former, whereas research showing that participants give money to a computer might suggest the latter. In three preregistered, well-powered studies, we examined the relation of Honesty-Humility with behavior in the Dictator Game (Study 1, N = 468) and Public Goods Game (Studies 2 and 3, each N = 313), while participants interacted either with humans (“social game”) or with a computer (“non-social game”). We found that (a) decisions in the non-social game predicted decisions in the social game, supporting the confusion hypothesis; (b) the effect of Honesty-Humility differed within and between games; and (b) participants who gave money to the computer reported acting as if they were playing with humans. Overall, the studies suggest that both prosocial preferences and confusion underlie giving behavior.

The restart effect in social dilemmas shows humans are self-interested not altruistic

“…These results, where participants “burn” money for no benefit to any participants, show that the costs of decisions in social experiments cannot be reliably used to infer social preferences ( 62 ). The patterns of behavior also suggest that confused conditional cooperation can account for a large part of the restart effect and the general pattern of contributions in public goods games, where behavior toward human and computerized groupmates is often strikingly similar, more so than in other simpler games ( 12 , 15 , 19 , 20 , 22 , 45 , 47 , 63 ).…”

“…Although there is growing evidence that confusion and learning is important in public goods games ( 12 – 15 , 19 , 20 , 22 , 23 , 26 , 27 , 39 , 44 – 47 ), such conclusions are challenged by one intriguing phenomenon, the “Restart Effect” ( 21 ). When players in repeated public goods games are surprisingly told, after the final round, that they will play again, cooperation tends to immediately increase ( 36 , 48 – 52 ).…”

Developing trustworthy artificial intelligence: insights from research on interpersonal, human-automation, and human-AI trust

“…In a similar vein, Tay et al (2014) reported that robots performing tasks aligned with gender or personality stereotypes—such as medical robots perceived as female or extroverted, and security robots as male or introverted—received higher approval ratings. Moreover, studies in economic games like the ultimatum and public goods games have shown that people display prosocial behaviors toward computers, suggesting a level of social engagement ( Nielsen et al, 2021 ; Russo et al, 2021 ).…”

The black box as a control for payoff-based learning in economic games

“…Alternatively, one can remove social factors, to create 'asocial controls', either by presenting the game differently, as is done by the black box, or structurally, by using revealed games played with computerized partners, which eliminate social concerns. There is a long history of using games with computerized partners, and such experiments have been useful to show that apparently social behaviours are not unique to games with human partners [24][25][26][27]30]. However, the interpretation of games with computers can be disputed, because although they clearly show that individuals often fail to maximize income even when there are no social consequences, they cannot rule out that individuals are psychologically motivated to help even computers.…”