Beware Of Popular Kids Bearing Gifts: A Framed Field Experiment - Jignan Chen, Daniel Houser, Natalia Montinari, And Marco Piovesan (Interdisciplinary Center For Economic Science, George Mason University) Page 4
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34popularity index). Further, we vary the visibility of decisions in the dictator game: Private
(anonymous decisions) or Public (decisions are known by all participants). We consider
this contrast to explore whether popular people are innately more pro-social than other, as
suggested by the literature above, or rather whether their prosociality is mediated by the
decision-making context.
The advantage of conducting this study in the school with children rather than in the
laboratory with “standard” subjects is twofold: First, we can exploit a natural network
rather than exogenously creating it in the laboratory. Second, we are able to capture
arguably the most important network of friendship in the child’s life: the reason is that
between 6 and 12, children spend most of their day at school. For most children, the
network of friends they have at school is the only one they have.
This line of research raises many important implications in public decision-making
circumstances. One such area is charitable giving. Much of the charitable giving literature
focuses on designing one-size-fits-all incentives that can be applied to the entire donor
base. An alternative is to conduct campaigns targeted specifically at those who are likely
to respond most strongly to the initiative. Our findings suggest that it may be fruitful and
potentially cost effective to conduct donation drives specifically targeted towards those
who are most popular. Another implication is that, since public officials are by definition
popular (they are supported and elected by voters), and thus more likely to be sensitive to
public decision environments, it may be especially valuable to ensure elected officials
make their decisions in public. Finally, our results help to explain why some people, but
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not all, become more generous in public decision contexts.
The remainder of the paper is organized as follows: Section III details our hypotheses;
Section IV describes the experimental design and procedures; Section V presents the
results of our study; and Section VI discusses our findings and concludes.
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For example, in Dictator games, it is routinely found that almost all people are selfish in “double-blind”
implementations of the game, and only some people become more generous when the game is played in a
“single-blind” context.
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