 Learning to be selfish? A large-scale longitudinal analysis of Dictator games played on Amazon Mechanical TurkAntonio A. Arechar and David G. Rand Journal of Economic Psychology, 2022, vol. 90, issue C Abstract: We investigate the role of experience playing the Dictator Game (DG) on allocations by aggregating data from 37 studies conducted on Amazon Mechanical Turk over a seven-year period. While prior evidence has shown a correlation between experience on Amazon Mechanical Turk and selfishness, it is unclear to what extent this is the result of selection versus learning. Examining a total of 27,266 decisions made by 17,791 unique individuals, our data shows evidence of significant negative effects of both selection and learning. First, people who participated in a greater total number of our studies were more selfish, even in their first game – indicating that people who are more likely to participate in our studies are more selfish. Second, a given individual tends to transfer less money over successive studies – indicating that experience with the DG leads to greater selfishness. These results provide clear evidence of learning even in this non-strategic social setting. Keywords: Dictator game; Selection; Experience; Learning; Cooperation; Decision-making; Mturk (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:joepsy:v:90:y:2022:i:c:s0167487022000083 DOI: 10.1016/j.joep.2022.102490 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Economic Psychology is currently edited by G. Antonides and D. Read More articles in Journal of Economic Psychology from Elsevier |
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