Big experimenter is watching you! Anonymity and prosocial behavior in the laboratory

Franziska Barmettler, Ernst Fehr and Christian Zehnder

No 27, ECON - Working Papers from Department of Economics - University of Zurich

Abstract: Social preference research has received considerable attention in recent years. Researchers have demonstrated that the presence of people with other-regarding preferences can have important implications in many economic dimensions. However, it is important to be aware of the fact that the empirical basis of this literature relies to a large extent on experiments that do not provide anonymity between experimenter and subject. It has been argued that this lack of experimenter-subject anonymity may create selfish incentives to engage in seemingly other-regarding behavior. If this were the case these experiments would overestimate the importance of social preferences. Previous studies provide mixed results and methodological di erences within and across studies make it difcult to isolate the impact of experimenter-subject anonymity on prosocial behavior. In this paper we use a novel procedure that allows us to examine the impact of the exact same ceteris-paribus variation in anonymity on behavior in three of the most commonly used games in the social preference literature. Our data reveals that introducing experimenter-subject anonymity has only minor, insignificant, e ects on prosocial behavior.

Keywords: Scrutiny; anonymity; laboratory experiments; prosocial behavior (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 D03 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011-08
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Big experimenter is watching you! Anonymity and prosocial behavior in the laboratory (2012)
Working Paper: Big Experimenter Is Watching You! Anonymity and Prosocial Behavior in the Laboratory (2011)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zur:econwp:027

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