scholarly journals How (un-)informative are experiments with “standard subjects” for other social groups? – The case of agricultural students and farmers

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sven Gruener ◽  
Mira Lehberger ◽  
Norbert Hirschauer ◽  
Oliver Mußhoff
Keyword(s):  
Risk Aversion ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Gift Exchange ◽  
Trust Game ◽  
Monetary Incentives ◽  
Negative Reciprocity ◽  
Ultimatum Bargaining Game ◽  
Experimental Subjects ◽  
Agricultural Students ◽  
Positive Reciprocity

This paper analyzes whether there is a gap between agricultural students’ and non-students’ (farmers’) behaviors in economic experiments which are often used to measure risk aversion, impatience, positive reciprocity, negative reciprocity, altruism, and trust. A further question is whether monetary incentives matter in this respect. We use the Holt and Laury procedure (2002) to elicit risk aversion, the procedure according to Laury et al. (2012) to measure impatience, a gift exchange game (Charness et al. 2004) to capture positive reciprocity, an ultimatum bargaining game (Güth et al. 1982) to assess negative reciprocity, a dictator experiment (Engel 2011) to gauge altruism, and a trust game (Kosfeld et al. 2005) to assess trust in others. We find no differences between agricultural students and farmers in their risk aversion, whereas the latter are fund to be considerably more impatient than the former. Positive and negative reciprocity is slightly more pronounced with farmers. Findings regarding altruism in the two groups are mixed and trust is somewhat more pronounced with farmers. The paper challenges approaches that assume that students can be used as standard experimental subjects whose behaviors can be generalized towards other populations.

scholarly journals Rethinking how risk aversion and impatience are linked with cognitive ability: Experimental findings from agricultural students and farmers

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sven Gruener
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Study ◽  
Risk Aversion ◽  
Cognitive Ability ◽  
Real World ◽  
American Economic Review ◽  
Time Preferences ◽  
Monetary Incentives ◽  
P Values ◽  
Agricultural Students ◽  
Experimental Findings

Dohmen et al. (2010) describe in their paper, which has been published in the American Economic Review, that risk aversion and impatience are negatively related to cognitive ability. This topic is important because controlling for cognitive ability might be necessary if someone is interested in the link of risk preferences or time preferences to real-world outcomes. We re-examine their key results by conducting an experimental study using two subject pools (agricultural students and farmers) and three levels of monetary incentives. Similar to Dohmen et al. (2010), our study finds the above-described negative correlations. However, the strength of the association is smaller and the p-values are quite large.

scholarly journals A Computational Model of Non-optimal Suspiciousness in the Minnesota Trust Game

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Kazinka ◽  
Iris Vilares ◽  
Angus MacDonald
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Risk Aversion ◽  
Computational Model ◽  
Inequity Aversion ◽  
Trust Game ◽  
Social Decision ◽  
Future Studies ◽  
Two Samples ◽  
Highly Correlated ◽  
Social Decision Making

This study modeled spite sensitivity (the worry that others are willing to incur a loss to hurt you), which is thought to undergird suspiciousness and persecutory ideation. Two samples performed a parametric, non-iterative trust game known as the Minnesota Trust Game (MTG). The MTG is designed to distinguish suspicious decision-making from otherwise rational mistrust by incentivizing the player to trust in certain situations. Individuals who do not trust even under these circumstances are particularly suspicious of their potential partner’s intentions. In Sample 1, 243 undergraduates who completed the MTG showed less trust as the amount of money they could lose increased. However, for choices where partners had a financial disincentive to betray the player, variation in the willingness to trust the partner was associated with suspicious beliefs. To further examine spite sensitivity, we modified the Fehr-Schmidt (1999) inequity aversion model, which compares unequal outcomes in social decision-making tasks, to include the possibility for spite sensitivity. In this case, an anticipated partner’s dislike of advantageous inequity (i.e., guilt) parameter could take on negative values, with negative guilt indicating spite. We hypothesized that the anticipated guilt parameter would be strongly related to suspicious beliefs. Our modification of the Fehr-Schmidt model improved estimation of MTG behavior. We isolated the estimation of partner’s spite-guilt, which was highly correlated with choices most associated with persecutory ideation. We replicated our findings in a second sample, where the estimated spite-guilt parameter correlated with self-reported suspiciousness. The “Suspiciousness” condition, unique to the MTG, can be modeled to isolate spite sensitivity, suggesting that spite sensitivity is separate from inequity aversion or risk aversion, and may provide a means to quantify persecution. The MTG offers promise for future studies to quantify persecutory beliefs in clinical populations.

Who is my stranger?

2018 ◽  
pp. 176-201
Author(s):  
Richard M. Titmuss
Keyword(s):  
Social Groups ◽  
Gift Exchange ◽  
The Other ◽  
Economic Aspects ◽  
Social Facts ◽  
The Social ◽  
Material Gain ◽  
The Future ◽  
Traditional Societies

This chapter explores the social and economic aspects of gift-exchange as a universal phenomenon. Examples drawn from both complex and traditional societies indicate that the personal gift and counter-gift, in which givers and receivers are known to each other and personally communicate with each other, is characterised by a great variety of sentiments and purposes. At one end of the spectrum, economic purposes may be dominant as in some forms of first-gifts which aim to achieve a material gain or to enhance prestige or to bring about material gain in the future. At the other end are those gifts whose purposes are predominantly social and moral in that as ‘total social facts’ they aim to serve friendly relationships, affection, and harmony between known individuals and social groups. Meanwhile, social gifts and actions carrying no explicit or implicit individual right to a return gift or action are forms of ‘creative altruism’.

Mortality Salience Increases Personal Relevance of the Norm of Reciprocity

2012 ◽  
Vol 111 (2) ◽  
pp. 565-574 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Schindler ◽  
Marc-André Reinhard ◽  
Dagmar Stahlberg
Keyword(s):  
Terror Management Theory ◽  
Mortality Salience ◽  
Terror Management ◽  
Management Theory ◽  
Personal Relevance ◽  
Cultural Norms ◽  
Negative Reciprocity ◽  
Norms And Values ◽  
Positive Reciprocity ◽  
Norm Of Reciprocity

Research on terror management theory found evidence that people under mortality salience strive to live up to salient cultural norms and values, like egalitarianism, pacifism, or helpfulness. A basic, strongly internalized norm in most human societies is the norm of reciprocity: people should support those who supported them (i.e., positive reciprocity), and people should injure those who injured them (i.e., negative reciprocity), respectively. In an experiment ( N = 98; 47 women, 51 men), mortality salience overall significantly increased personal relevance of the norm of reciprocity ( M = 4.45, SD = 0.65) compared to a control condition ( M = 4.19, SD = 0.59). Specifically, under mortality salience there was higher motivation to punish those who treated them unfavourably (negative norm of reciprocity). Unexpectedly, relevance of the norm of positive reciprocity remained unaffected by mortality salience. Implications and limitations are discussed.

Paying Back People Who Harmed Us but Not People Who Helped Us: Direct Negative Reciprocity Precedes Direct Positive Reciprocity in Early Development

2019 ◽  
Vol 30 (9) ◽  
pp. 1273-1286 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nadia Chernyak ◽  
Kristin L. Leimgruber ◽  
Yarrow C. Dunham ◽  
Jingshi Hu ◽  
Peter R. Blake
Keyword(s):  
Young Children ◽  
Social Norms ◽  
Early Development ◽  
Social Exchange ◽  
Social Norm ◽  
Evolution Of Cooperation ◽  
Critical Component ◽  
Negative Reciprocity ◽  
Positive Direct ◽  
Positive Reciprocity

The principle of direct reciprocity, or paying back specific individuals, is assumed to be a critical component of everyday social exchange and a key mechanism for the evolution of cooperation. Young children know the norm of reciprocity, but it is unclear whether they follow the norm for both positive and negative direct reciprocity or whether reciprocity is initially generalized. Across five experiments ( N = 330), we showed that children between 4 and 8 years of age engaged in negative direct reciprocity but generalized positive reciprocity, despite recalling benefactors. Children did not endorse the norm of positive direct reciprocity as applying to them until about 7 years of age (Study 4), but a short social-norm training enhanced this behavior in younger children (Study 5). Results suggest that negative direct reciprocity develops early, whereas positive reciprocity becomes targeted to other specific individuals only as children learn and adopt social norms.

scholarly journals Ancient Origins of the Global Variation in Economic Preferences

2020 ◽  
Vol 110 ◽  
pp. 319-323
Author(s):  
Anke Becker ◽  
Benjamin Enke ◽  
Armin Falk
Keyword(s):  
Risk Aversion ◽  
Time Preference ◽  
Population Level ◽  
Distance Measures ◽  
Linguistic Distance ◽  
Migration Patterns ◽  
Negative Reciprocity ◽  
Global Variation ◽  
Economic Preferences ◽  
Cross Country

This paper shows that contemporary population-level heterogeneity in risk aversion, time preference, altruism, positive reciprocity, negative reciprocity, and trust partly traces back to the structure of the migration patterns of our very early ancestors. To document this pattern, we link differences in preferences between populations to the length of time elapsed since the ancestors of the respective groups broke apart from each other, as proxied by genetic and linguistic distance measures. Preference differences are significantly increasing in ancestral distance in both cross-country regressions and within-country analyses across groups of migrants.

scholarly journals Are Risk Aversion and Impatience Related to Cognitive Ability?

2010 ◽  
Vol 100 (3) ◽  
pp. 1238-1260 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Dohmen ◽  
Armin Falk ◽  
David Huffman ◽  
Uwe Sunde
Keyword(s):  
Risk Aversion ◽  
Cognitive Ability ◽  
Representative Sample ◽  
Credit Constraints ◽  
Personal Characteristics ◽  
Choice Experiments ◽  
Monetary Incentives ◽  
Rule Out

This paper investigates whether there is a link between cognitive ability, risk aversion, and impatience, using a representative sample of roughly 1,000 German adults. Subjects participate in choice experiments with monetary incentives measuring risk aversion, and impatience over an annual horizon, and conduct two different, widely used, tests of cognitive ability. We find that lower cognitive ability is associated with greater risk aversion, and more pronounced impatience. These relationships are significant, and robust to controlling for personal characteristics, education, income, and measures of credit constraints. We perform a series of additional robustness checks, which help rule out other possible confounds.

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