A quote attributed to Werner Herzog reads that “civilization is like a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and darkness.” Some of my recent work together with Anja Achtziger and Alexander K. Wagner points out that the same might be true about fairness and pro-social behavior.
Take our 2015 article “Money, Depletion, and Prosociality in the Dictator Game,” published in the Journal of Neuroscience, Psychology, and Economics. Merely days after publication, it found some echo in the press, for instance here.
In this article we report on a study on Self-control and the Dictator Game which we carried out with N=128 participants in my native Valencia (Spain). In the Dictator Game, the dictator can freely allocate a given sum of money among him or herself and another participant, the receiver. Economic theory delivers a ruthless prediction: Since there are no consequences and no risk, people should selfishly keep it all. However, dozens of experiments have shown that people generally give something to the receiver. This is a hotly discussed topic, with defendants of human generosity interpreting the results as a sign of people’s good hearts, and others pointing out that there might be a bunch of reasons for it, ranging from a lack of belief on the full anonymity of the interaction to simply an incorrect application of our acquired social behaviors (which cover highly non-anonymous, consequence-full situations) to this artificial setting.
Before playing the dictator game, half of our participants performed a concentration task which has been showed to heavily tax self-control resources (this is called “ego depletion”). The other half performed a lighter version of the task which should not be depleting at all. The idea, which is founded on rather detailed theories of human behavior arising in psychology, is that whenever your self-control resources are low, your natural, default behavior will come up. In psychological parlance, implicit motives implemented by automatic processes become predominant. More poetically, the thin layer is broken more easily, and you show your true self.
Participants played twelve dictator games in such a way that all interactions were anonymous. In the non-depleted group, people started out making some transfers, but those decreased steadily in time, becoming clearly lower at the end. A likely interpretation is that as they learned that the game was truly anonymous and they could truly keep the money without consequences, they consequently showed their natural egoism more and more.
The depleted group immediately jumped to rather low offers and stood there. There was a clear difference at the beginning, showing that with lowered self-control resources, people behave more selfishly. Towards the end, however, both groups were fully comparable, as everybody was behaving more egoistically than if, as in many experiments, we had simply let them play once.
Take now our 2016 article “The Impact of Self-Control Depletion on Social Preferences in the Ultimatum Game,” also with Anja Achtziger and Alexander K. Wagner, published in the Journal of Economic Psychology. In this article, we turned to the Ultimatum Game, which is played between a proposer and a responder. In this game, the proposer can make a proposal on how to allocate a given sum of money among him or herself and the other participant, the responder. However, unlike in the Dictator Game, here the responder has a say: if he accepts, the proposal will be implemented. If he rejects, the money will be taken away and both the proposer and the responder will get zero. Game-theoretic predictions are now more nuanced. If the responder is purely self-interested, he should accept any offer, no matter how small the share (better than nothing!). Anticipating that, the proposer should offer as little as possible and keep as much for herself as possible. That does not happen in the lab: people get angry at “unfair” offers and literally leave money on the table, punishing greedy proposers. And proposers typically offer significant shares to the responder, a few going as far as a 50-50 split (but not many; most keep around two thirds for themselves).
Motives in the Ultimatum Game are less simple than in the Dictator Game. For the responder, leaving money on the table does not speak of generosity: rather the opposite, it shows a possibly emotional-affective reaction and a dislike to receive less than others. For the proposers, offering more than just a little might come out of the kindness of their hearts, but it might just as well be a strategic reaction to avoid the predictable negative reaction of the responders. That is, apparently generous behavior might be driven by simple fear of rejection.
In the 2016 article, we analyzed behavior in the Ultimatum Game after putting people (N=288) through a depletion manipulation as in the 2015 article. Actually, we collected data for both experiments during the same days in Valencia, so the observations come from the same statistical population (but, obviously, nobody participated in both experiments!). So we know from the 2015 article the depletion made people more selfish. What happened in the Ultimatum Game? Depleted responders accepted more unfair offers than non-depleted ones, and depleted proposers made larger offers than non-depleted ones.
Whoa, stop there. If we did not have the evidence from the Dictator Game, we could naively speculate that depletion made people more generous, right? But that can’t be the case, because we know what happened in the Dictator Game (and that is why we wrote the articles in that order). So how do we explain the data? Simple. “Take the money and run.” Depleted responders simply focused on the money, and fairness (being treated unfairly in this case) be damned. The more you accept, the more you earn. Which, as in the Dictator Game, just shows that pure self-interest might come more naturally than social notions of fairness. While in the Dictator Game we saw generous behavior being displaced by self-interest, here we see the negative reaction to being treated unfairly being displaced by self-interest.
What about proposers? Depleted proposers were in a similar role as depleted dictators in the Dictator Game, and we know those became more selfish. So if depleted proposers became more selfish, why did they offer more? Simple: if you offer too little, you run the risk of rejection. So you can reduce that risk by increasing your offer a bit. Which, uncomfortably, means that a good part of the original motivation to offer more than just a little in the Ultimatum Game might just be self-interest after all.
What do we learn from all this? Alas, fairness might be a thin layer after all, and the classical homo oeconomicus might be more present in ourselves than we like to believe. Self-control is a very important capability allowing us to function normally in society, and it seems that one of its roles is to ensure that we behave in accordance with conventional social values and keep our ugly, egoistical selves from showing up too much. Now think of the recent economic crisis and the public outrage at certain boni policies, to quote but one example. Bring that together with the standard image of an overworked, stressed, depleted executive. Hm. Food for thought. Maybe it’s time for mandatory breaks and waiting periods before big decisions are made.
NOTE: Part of this post previously appeared in 2015 in my university blog, which I recently took down (one man, one blog seems enough to me). In reposting here, I took the chance to expand it to cover the 2016 article.
Carlos' Ramblings 