scholarly journals A positive effect of flowers rather than eye images in a large-scale, cross-cultural dictator game

2012 ◽  
Vol 279 (1742) ◽  
pp. 3556-3564 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nichola J. Raihani ◽  
Redouan Bshary
Keyword(s):  
Labour Market ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Dictator Game ◽  
Social Cues ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Systematic Variation ◽  
Mechanical Turk ◽  
Amazon Mechanical Turk ◽  
Cooperative Behaviour ◽  
Positive Effect

People often consider how their behaviour will be viewed by others, and may cooperate to avoid gaining a bad reputation. Sensitivity to reputation may be elicited by subtle social cues of being watched: previous studies have shown that people behave more cooperatively when they see images of eyes rather than control images. Here, we tested whether eye images enhance cooperation in a dictator game, using the online labour market Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT). In contrast to our predictions and the results of most previous studies, dictators gave away more money when they saw images of flowers rather than eye images. Donations in response to eye images were not significantly different to donations under control treatments. Dictator donations varied significantly across cultures but there was no systematic variation in responses to different image types across cultures. Unlike most previous studies, players interacting via AMT may feel truly anonymous when making decisions and, as such, may not respond to subtle social cues of being watched. Nevertheless, dictators gave away similar amounts as in previous studies, so anonymity did not erase helpfulness. We suggest that eye images might only promote cooperative behaviour in relatively public settings and that people may ignore these cues when they know their behaviour is truly anonymous.

scholarly journals Learning to be selfish? A large-scale longitudinal analysis of Dictator games played on Amazon Mechanical Turk

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antonio Alonso Arechar ◽  
David Gertler Rand
Keyword(s):  
Longitudinal Analysis ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Dictator Game ◽  
Mechanical Turk ◽  
Amazon Mechanical Turk ◽  
Social Setting ◽  
Negative Effects ◽  
Dictator Games

We investigate whether experience playing the Dictator Game (DG) affects prosociality by aggregating data from 37 experiments run on Amazon Mechanical Turk over a six-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 experiments were more selfish, even in their first game – indicating that people who are more likely to select into our experiments are more selfish. Second, a given individual tends to transfer less money over successive experiments – indicating that experience with the DG leads to greater selfishness. These results provide clear evidence of learning even in this non-strategic social setting.

scholarly journals Testing the Waters: Behavior across Participant Pools

2021 ◽  
Vol 111 (2) ◽  
pp. 687-719
Author(s):  
Erik Snowberg ◽  
Leeat Yariv
Keyword(s):  
External Validity ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Student Population ◽  
University Student ◽  
Mechanical Turk ◽  
Amazon Mechanical Turk ◽  
Lab Experiments ◽  
The Us ◽  
Small Set ◽  
Observer Effects

We leverage a large-scale incentivized survey eliciting behaviors from (almost) an entire undergraduate university student population, a representative sample of the US population, and Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) to address concerns about the external validity of experiments with student participants. Behavior in the student population offers bounds on behaviors in other populations, and correlations between behaviors are similar across samples. Furthermore, non-student samples exhibit higher levels of noise. Adding historical lab participation data, we find a small set of attributes over which lab participants differ from non-lab participants. An additional set of lab experiments shows no evidence of observer effects. (JEL C83, D90, D91)

scholarly journals TheChildLab.com A Video Chat Platform for Developmental Research

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Sheskin ◽  
Frank Keil
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Longitudinal Research ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Mechanical Turk ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Psychology Research ◽  
Developmental Research ◽  
The Past ◽  
Adult Participants ◽  
Amazon's Mechanical Turk

Over the past decade, the internet has become an important platform for many types of psychology research, especially research with adult participants on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. More recently, developmental researchers have begun to explore how online studies might be conducted with infants and children. Here, we introduce a new platform for online developmental research that includes live interaction with a researcher, and use it to replicate classic results in the literature. We end by discussing future research, including the potential for large-scale cross-cultural and longitudinal research.

scholarly journals The Virtuous Cycle of Property

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marco Fabbri ◽  
Giuseppe Dari-Mattiacci
Keyword(s):  
Property Rights ◽  
Land Tenure ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Private Property ◽  
Dictator Game ◽  
Private Property Rights ◽  
Tenure Reform ◽  
Large Scale Land ◽  
Virtuous Cycle ◽  
Positive Effect

The article shows that formalizing private property rights has a positive effect on the propensity to respect the property of others. We study a recent large-scale land tenure reform in West Africa which was the first of its kind to be implemented as a randomized control-trial. Results of a modified dictator game show that the formalization of private property rights reduced an individual's willingness to take from others' endowment. We used additional experimental measures and post-experimental survey data to rule out alternative explanations for the observed behavior that do not imply a change in preferences.

scholarly journals Moralizing gods, impartiality and religious parochialism across 15 societies

2019 ◽  
Vol 286 (1898) ◽  
pp. 20190202 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Lang ◽  
Benjamin G. Purzycki ◽  
Coren L. Apicella ◽  
Quentin D. Atkinson ◽  
Alexander Bolyanatz ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Interaction ◽  
Resource Sharing ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Dictator Game ◽  
Random Allocation ◽  
Diverse Populations ◽  
Cooperative Behaviour ◽  
Ancestor Worship ◽  
Open Questions ◽  
Behavioural Experiments

The emergence of large-scale cooperation during the Holocene remains a central problem in the evolutionary literature. One hypothesis points to culturally evolved beliefs in punishing, interventionist gods that facilitate the extension of cooperative behaviour toward geographically distant co-religionists. Furthermore, another hypothesis points to such mechanisms being constrained to the religious ingroup, possibly at the expense of religious outgroups. To test these hypotheses, we administered two behavioural experiments and a set of interviews to a sample of 2228 participants from 15 diverse populations. These populations included foragers, pastoralists, horticulturalists, and wage labourers, practicing Buddhism, Christianity, and Hinduism, but also forms of animism and ancestor worship. Using the Random Allocation Game (RAG) and the Dictator Game (DG) in which individuals allocated money between themselves, local and geographically distant co-religionists, and religious outgroups, we found that higher ratings of gods as monitoring and punishing predicted decreased local favouritism (RAGs) and increased resource-sharing with distant co-religionists (DGs). The effects of punishing and monitoring gods on outgroup allocations revealed between-site variability, suggesting that in the absence of intergroup hostility, moralizing gods may be implicated in cooperative behaviour toward outgroups. These results provide support for the hypothesis that beliefs in monitoring and punitive gods help expand the circle of sustainable social interaction, and open questions about the treatment of religious outgroups.

scholarly journals Turkers of the World Unite: Multilevel In-Group Bias Among Crowdworkers on Amazon Mechanical Turk

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-159 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abdullah Almaatouq ◽  
Peter Krafft ◽  
Yarrow Dunham ◽  
David G. Rand ◽  
Alex Pentland
Keyword(s):  
Group Treatment ◽  
Dictator Game ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Black Box ◽  
Mechanical Turk ◽  
Amazon Mechanical Turk ◽  
Economic Games ◽  
The World ◽  
Good Proxy ◽  
Indispensable Tool

Crowdsourcing has become an indispensable tool in the behavioral sciences. Often, the “crowd” is considered a black box for gathering impersonal but generalizable data. Researchers sometimes seem to forget that crowdworkers are people with social contexts, unique personalities, and lives. To test this possibility, we measure how crowdworkers ( N = 2,337, preregistered) share a monetary endowment in a Dictator Game with another Mechanical Turk (MTurk) worker, a worker from another crowdworking platform, or a randomly selected stranger. Results indicate preferential in-group treatment for MTurk workers in particular and for crowdworkers in general. Cooperation levels from typical anonymous economic games on MTurk are not a good proxy for anonymous interactions and may generalize most readily only to the intragroup context.

scholarly journals The Language Demographics of Amazon Mechanical Turk

2014 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 79-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellie Pavlick ◽  
Matt Post ◽  
Ann Irvine ◽  
Dmitry Kachaev ◽  
Chris Callison-Burch
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Language Skills ◽  
Statistical Machine Translation ◽  
Mechanical Turk ◽  
Amazon Mechanical Turk ◽  
Indian Languages ◽  
Parallel Corpora ◽  
Bilingual Dictionaries ◽  
Bilingual Speakers ◽  
Translation Systems

We present a large scale study of the languages spoken by bilingual workers on Mechanical Turk (MTurk). We establish a methodology for determining the language skills of anonymous crowd workers that is more robust than simple surveying. We validate workers’ self-reported language skill claims by measuring their ability to correctly translate words, and by geolocating workers to see if they reside in countries where the languages are likely to be spoken. Rather than posting a one-off survey, we posted paid tasks consisting of 1,000 assignments to translate a total of 10,000 words in each of 100 languages. Our study ran for several months, and was highly visible on the MTurk crowdsourcing platform, increasing the chances that bilingual workers would complete it. Our study was useful both to create bilingual dictionaries and to act as census of the bilingual speakers on MTurk. We use this data to recommend languages with the largest speaker populations as good candidates for other researchers who want to develop crowdsourced, multilingual technologies. To further demonstrate the value of creating data via crowdsourcing, we hire workers to create bilingual parallel corpora in six Indian languages, and use them to train statistical machine translation systems.

scholarly journals Supervisors’ Leadership Styles’ Influence on Foreign Teachers’ Self-Efficacy in a Cross-Cultural Work Setting: A Moderated Mediation Analysis

SAGE Open ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 215824402199454
Author(s):  
Bernard Gumah ◽  
Liu Wenbin ◽  
Maxwell Akansina Aziabah
Keyword(s):  
Leadership Styles ◽  
Leadership Style ◽  
Self Efficacy ◽  
Moderated Mediation ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Cultural Work ◽  
Adaptation Theory ◽  
Foreign Teachers ◽  
Communication Challenges ◽  
Positive Effect

Leadership style impacts on the manner and frequency of feedback transmission. However, communication challenges between superiors and subordinates originate from cultural differences, which undermine the usefulness of feedback. The study tested leadership style’s effect on self-efficacy through a moderated mediation approach, examined through the lens of the cross-cultural adaptation theory. Path analysis conducted on data from 281 foreign teachers in Chengdu, China, revealed that there is a positive effect of Chinese supervisors’ leadership styles on foreign teacher’s self-efficacy. Leadership style similarly has an influence on the nature of feedback. And the nature of feedback in turn mediates leadership style and self-efficacy. We establish in particular that transactional and transformational leadership styles, through the nature of feedback, influence self-efficacy of foreign teachers. Moreover, the association between the nature of feedback and self-efficacy is moderated by the perceived value of feedback. Employees’ perceptions are also found to be crucial in determining the value of feedback. It is thus imperative for supervisors and managers working with foreigners as subordinates to figure out when and how to provide valuable feedback. We conclude with suggested areas for further research.

scholarly journals Are “Internet+” tactics the key to poverty alleviation in China’s rural ethnic minority areas? Empirical evidence from Sichuan Province

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiang Yin ◽  
Zhiyi Meng ◽  
Xin Yi ◽  
Yong Wang ◽  
Xia Hua
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Minority ◽  
Poverty Alleviation ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Sichuan Province ◽  
Infrastructure Investment ◽  
Communication Infrastructure ◽  
Gdp Growth Rate ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Positive Effect

AbstractChina has made great efforts to alleviate poverty in rural ethnic minority areas and targeted achieving the poverty-alleviation task by the end of 2020. Aba, Ganzi, and Liangshan, three of the poorest ethnic prefectures in Sichuan Province, Southwest China, have all implemented “Internet+” tactics since 2013, which have had the positive effect of increasing family revenues by improving communication infrastructure and encouraging the large-scale use of e-commerce. This paper aims to comprehensively investigate whether “Internet+” tactics play a key role in poverty alleviation in Sichuan’s rural ethnic minority areas and to propose further measures to enhance the efficiency of e-commerce practice. To this end, we conduct an analysis using the framework of classic growth theory and use panel data from 2000 to 2018 to examine the relationship between Communication Infrastructure Investment (CII) and a set of poverty-alleviation indicators, including local GDP growth rate (LGGR), local government revenue (LGR), and per-capita income of residents (PCIR). The results indicate that strengthening CII improves the PCIR and local economic growth, playing a key role in poverty alleviation. However, the stimulation of CII on LGGR and LGR wanes as time passes. More financial and technical actions will be needed to improve the efficiency and quality of current strategies for sustainable development in those areas.

scholarly journals Large scale land investments and food security in agropastoral areas of Ethiopia

Food Security ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adugna Eneyew Bekele ◽  
Liesbeth Dries ◽  
Wim Heijman ◽  
Dusan Drabik
Keyword(s):  
Food Security ◽  
Food Intake ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Living Standard ◽  
Additional Food ◽  
The World Bank ◽  
Direct Benefits ◽  
Large Scale Land ◽  
Household Food Consumption ◽  
Positive Effect

AbstractIn Ethiopia, large scale land investments have been expanding into pastoral regions. However, little is known about the consequences of these investments on the food security of the pastoral community. Using Living Standard Measurement Survey data of the World Bank, we find that, on average, about 32% of the respondents from the (agro-)pastoral regions are food insecure. After controlling for confounders, proximity to large scale land investments is associated with additional food intake of up to 745 kcal per day per adult compared to the households located farther away from a large scale land investment. Proximity to large scale land investment has no significant effect on the coping strategies based food security. For households located in proximity to a large scale land investment, food intake significantly increases with access to roads and markets. Proximity to a large scale land investment has a positive effect on household food consumption not necessarily because of direct benefits from large scale land investments, but due to land and soil quality near the large scale land investments.

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