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

Nichola J Raihani,Redouan Bshary

doi:10.1098/rspb.2012.0758

Abstract

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.

Highlights

Humans rarely behave according to economic theories of self-interest
We tested whether eye images enhance cooperation in a dictator game, using the online labour market Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT)
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

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Humans rarely behave according to economic theories of self-interest. A slew of real-world and laboratory experiments have shown that, while taking their own material payoffs into account when making decisions about resource allocation in social interactions, humans are sensitive to social norms, fairness preferences and how others might respond to their behaviour. No study has examined whether there is cross-cultural variation in the effects of eye images on subject behaviour in economic games. We used a novel approach to test the effect of eye images on donations in the dictator game, while controlling for additional variables such as culture, age, income, education level and gender. We asked whether donations in the dictator game were influenced by the presence of subtle social cues (eye images) and whether these effects, if they existed, were mediated by other demographic or cultural variables. Each category had a minimum of 10 independent data points (see electronic supplementary material, table S1) This categorical variable was set as the response term in series of ordinal logistic regression models. We compared a series of models, including age, culture, education level, gender, income level and image (eyes/flowers/control), as well as all twoway interactions, as explanatory terms. No qualitative differences were found and so we retained these individuals in the analysis presented here

RESULTS

DISCUSSION

South Asia