Looking for a Report Templates? Download it for free!

children reach age 8 or 9, they develop an understanding self-presentation; further, they

begin to modify their behaviors to appear more favorably to others.

In light of the hypotheses, we only report the one-sided tests for non-parametric tests

below.

IV. Experimental Design and Procedure

Participants. The experimental sessions were conducted in March 2012. Our participants

were 231 children (109 females

), six to 12 years old (M = 8.74 years, SD = 0.11 years).

These children were enrolled in 12 classes across 5 schools in the district of Treviso

(Italy). Each class was randomly assigned to one of two between-class treatments: Public

(91 children; 40 females; Age M = 9.14 years, SD = 1.50 years); or Private (140 children;

69 females; Age M = 8.47 years, SD = 1.44 years).

Procedures. Children participated in a Dictator Game

: each child received 4 colored

rubber bands

. The children then had to decide how many rubber bands to donate to

another real, but anonymous, child from another participating, anonymous class. Children

made their decisions in private; one child at a time would step out of the classroom with

his/her four bands and an empty envelope with his/her individually assigned ID written

on it. Children were instructed that before returning to the room, they should put any

bands they wanted to donate in the envelope, and hide any bands they decided to keep for

themselves

. Upon return to the classroom, they handed the envelope to the experimenter

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Data was missing on the gender of 16 observations (twelve for treatment Private and four for treatment

Public).

Before the dictator game, in both the public and private treatments, to become familiar with the decision

situation, children were asked to imagine having four rubber bands. They were then asked to indicate how

many bands they would like to share with another anonymous real child participating to the experiment in

another class or school. We asked each the child to think about this situation in private, without

communicating with any other children, and to fill out a report sheet with the number of bands that they

want to share. The script in Appendix A.1 reproduces the verbal instructions that were read to the children.

Data from the training stage are analyzed in Blake et al. (2014).

We used silly bands because they are popular among children of the ages we study. Different colors,

sizes and shapes make this prize suitable to all ages and genders. Previous experiments with children living

in the same geographical area used silly bands as an effective incentive for children in primary schools

(see, e.g., Houser et al., 2012; Maggian & Villeval, 2013).

Children may be more likely to donate damaged silly bands or those with shapes or colors they do not

prefer. To address this, all children were told that at the end of the experiment they could trade bands with

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 9