Anonymity and incentives: An investigation of techniques to reduce socially desirable responding in the Trust Game

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Abstract

Economic games offer a convenient approach for the study of prosocial behavior. As an advantage, they allow for straightforward implementation of different techniques to reduce socially desirable responding. We investigated the effectiveness of the most prominent of these techniques, namely providing behavior-contingent incentives and maximizing anonymity in three versions of the Trust Game: (i) a hypothetical version without monetary incentives and with a typical level of anonymity, (ii) an incentivized version with monetary incentives and the same (typical) level of anonymity, and (iii) an indirect questioning version without incentives but with a maximum level of anonymity, rendering responses inconclusive due to adding random noise via the Randomized Response Technique. Results from a large ( N= 1,267) and heterogeneous sample showed comparable levels of trust for the hypothetical and incentivized versions using direct questioning. However, levels of trust decreased when maximizing the inconclusiveness of responses through indirect questioning. This implies that levels of trust might be particularly sensitive to changes in individuals’ anonymity but not necessarily to monetary incentives.

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The weirdest people in the world?

Joseph Henrich, Steven Heine, Ara Norenzayan (2010)

Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world's top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers - often implicitly - assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these "standard subjects" are as representative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there is substantial variability in experimental results across populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species - frequent outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, self-concepts and related motivations, and the heritability of IQ. The findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans. Many of these findings involve domains that are associated with fundamental aspects of psychology, motivation, and behavior - hence, there are no obvious a priori grounds for claiming that a particular behavioral phenomenon is universal based on sampling from a single subpopulation. Overall, these empirical patterns suggests that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions of human nature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity. We close by proposing ways to structurally re-organize the behavioral sciences to best tackle these challenges.

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Bayesian t tests for accepting and rejecting the null hypothesis.

Jeffrey N. Rouder, Paul L. Speckman, Dongchu Sun … (2009)

Progress in science often comes from discovering invariances in relationships among variables; these invariances often correspond to null hypotheses. As is commonly known, it is not possible to state evidence for the null hypothesis in conventional significance testing. Here we highlight a Bayes factor alternative to the conventional t test that will allow researchers to express preference for either the null hypothesis or the alternative. The Bayes factor has a natural and straightforward interpretation, is based on reasonable assumptions, and has better properties than other methods of inference that have been advocated in the psychological literature. To facilitate use of the Bayes factor, we provide an easy-to-use, Web-based program that performs the necessary calculations.

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Randomized response: a survey technique for eliminating evasive answer bias.

S L Warner (1965)

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Author and article information

Journal

Title: Judgment and Decision Making

Abbreviated Title: Judgm. decis. mak.

Publisher: Cambridge University Press (CUP)

ISSN (Electronic): 1930-2975

Publication date Created: September 2016

Publication date (Electronic): January 01 2023

Publication date (Print): September 2016

Volume: 11

Issue: 5

Pages: 527-536

Article

DOI: 10.1017/S1930297500004605

SO-VID: de4ece19-0966-4fd1-9761-66b7fa9b08b6

License:

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/

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