Under the Umbrella of Prosocial Behavior – A Critical Comparison of Paradigms

Despite the discontent, cruelty, and warfare that fill the daily news, people show tremendous capacities to help and cooperate with others. Prosocial behavior is used as an umbrella term capturing the diversity of selfless acts. As such, researchers have developed a variety of tasks and it is crucial to verify that they measure the same underlying construct of prosocial behavior. Previous studies have focused on comparing anonymous, one-shot economic games providing evidence for behavioral consistency across games. The current study extends these findings by (i) comparing both repeated economic and naturalistic interactive games in a within-subject design, and (ii) letting participants play in face-to-face dyadic settings. In total, 74 participants completed six tasks: three variants of a social dilemma game, an Egg Hunt game measuring helping behavior, a group decision-making paradigm requiring communication skills, and a Tangram game where participants solved puzzles together. A Principal Component Analysis revealed that two components best describe the behavior in these tasks. The three social dilemma games loaded on the first component, termed “social dilemma games”. These games were distinct from the interactive games and the helping and decision-making tasks loaded on the second component, termed “naturalistic games”. The Tangram game was unrelated to all other games. These findings suggest that the behavioral consistency observed in economic games has its limits to generalize to other types of tasks and emphasizes the importance of choosing the appropriate (combination of) paradigms to measure prosocial behavior. Theoretical and methodological differences between tasks are discussed to explain these findings.

A Review of Mouse-Tracking Applications in Economic Studies

Since mouse-tracking paradigm came under the spotlight two decades ago, by providing mouse cursor trajectories, it has been applied by behavioral scientists to a variety of topics to help understand real-time psychological state when people are faced with multiple choices. In this article, we provide a comprehensive, documentation of experimental economics studies with mouse-tracking paradigm. Among these studies, some focus on measuring choice uncertainty including subject uncertainty, temporal uncertainty, and probabilistic uncertainty; the rest are concerned with economic games including bargaining games and social dilemma games. Why and how these works employ mouse-tracking technique in their experiments is elaborated in detail. Finally, limitations of mouse-tracking paradigm are discussed, and research opportunities are proposed. Basic know-hows are appended as a general guide for interested readers.

Belief Heterogeneity and the Restart Effect in a Public Goods Game

We explore how subjects with heterogeneous beliefs respond to a surprise restart in a linear public goods game played for 20 rounds using either a “partners” or a “strangers” protocol. There are two restarts: one prior to Round 11 and another prior to Round 16. We elicit subject beliefs at the outset and classify subjects into three groups—Top, Middle, and Bottom—depending on their prior beliefs about their peers’ contributions to the public good. Then, we look at how these three groups respond, in terms of their beliefs and contributions, before and after the restart. We replicate the restart effect, but find that (i) it is much more pronounced for partner matching than for stranger matching and (ii) it is less pronounced in treatments with belief elicitation compared to control treatments where beliefs are not elicited. We also find that the restart has the effect of regenerating a sense of optimism among the subjects, which is reflected in increased contributions subsequently. This increase in contribution is driven mostly by those subjects who started the game with relatively more optimistic beliefs. Our results have implications for sustaining cooperation in social dilemma games.

Group Formation and Cooperation in Social Dilemmas: a Survey and Meta-Analytic Evidence

We survey the growing literature on group formation in the context of three types of social dilemma games: public goods games, common pool resources, and the prisoner’s dilemma. The 62 surveyed papers study the effect of different sorting mechanisms – endogenous, endogenous with the option to play the game, and exogenous – on cooperation rates. Our survey shows that cooperators are highly sensitive to the presence of free-riders, independently of the sorting mechanism. We complement the survey with a meta-analysis showing no difference in terms of cooperation between studies implementing an endogenous and exogenous sorting. What is more, we find that it is no more likely for a cooperator to be matched with like-minded partners in endogenously formed groups than in exogenously formed groups. These observations are related. As we show in the survey, the success of a sorting method in matching like-minded individuals and the levels of cooperation are closely interlinked.