Assessing the generalizability of behavior and motives across different settings

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One critical issue in cooperation research is that evidence for certain behaviors often stems from public goods games played for very short periods of time in an artificial environment, the laboratory. In addition, observer effects may distort such evidence. For this reason, my article presents a new and complementary setting (Ikariam), using data for cooperative behavior from a context-rich environment, avoiding observer effects. Compared to behaviors in standard public goods games, I find that the proportion of free riders in Ikariam is about the same as in public goods games (25%) but there are fewer high and conditional cooperators.