Big experimenter is watching you! Anonymity and prosocial behavior in the laboratory

Abstract

Social preference research has received considerable attention in recent years. Researchers have demonstrated that the presence of people with other-regarding preferences can have important implications in many economic dimensions. However, it is important to be aware of the fact that the empirical basis of this literature relies to a large extent on experiments that do not provide anonymity between experimenter and subject. It has been argued that this lack of experimenter-subject anonymity may create selfish incentives to engage in seemingly other-regarding behavior. If this were the case these experiments would overestimate the importance of social preferences. Previous studies provide mixed results and methodological differences within and across studies make it difficult to isolate the impact of experimenter-subject anonymity on prosocial behavior. In this paper we use a novel procedure that allows us to examine the impact of the exact same ceteris-paribus variation in anonymity on behavior in three of the most commonly used games in the social preference literature. Our data reveals that introducing experimenter-subject anonymity has only minor, insignificant, effects on prosocial behavior.

An examination of the effect of messages on cooperation under double-blind and single-blind payoff procedures

“…Our inability to replicate the cooperation-enhancing effect of the opportunity to send handwritten messages suggests that this behaviour may not be as robust as it has been perceived although two other studies have replicated the results. The lack of an effect from the payoff procedures in our data and in Barmettler et al (2012), when giving both methods comparable emphasis, is counter to received wisdom. Both of our findings suggest that more research is needed to better understand the subtlety of human behaviour.…”

“…Subjects privately opened their mailboxes, collected their earnings envelopes, and left the lab. As argued by Barmettler, et al (2012), previous comparisons between single-blind and double-blind procedures tend to emphasize the payoff procedures in double-blind, but not single-blind. This asymmetry may create a demand effect for the subjects and encourage people to act more selfishly in double-blind experiments (see Zizzo, 2010 for a discussion of experimenter demand effects).…”

Measuring and Bounding Experimenter Demand

“…Barmettler et al (2012) find no evidence that experimenter-participant anonymity affects behavior in standard social preference measures, while other studies document that nonanonymity in the lab can increase pro-social behavior . We also relate to work that explores the principal-agent relationship between experimenter and participant (Chassang et al, 2012;Shmaya and Yariv, 2016).…”

“…We also contribute to the literature which examines the effects of anonymity on social behavior in the laboratory (Barmettler et al, 2012;Levitt and List, 2007;Hoffman et al, 1996Hoffman et al, , 1994. Barmettler et al (2012) find no evidence that experimenter-participant anonymity affects behavior in standard social preference measures, while other studies document that nonanonymity in the lab can increase pro-social behavior .…”

Laboratory experiments in innovation research: a methodological overview and a review of the current literature

“…Barmettler et al (2012) contradict this argument and show experimentally that complete anonymity between the experimenter and participants does not change the latter's behavior. Furthermore, it is argued that close social observation is not limited to the lab but rather is a feature common to all economic interactions.…”