From: Emlyn O'regan (oregan.emlyn@healthsolve.com.au)
Date: Sun Mar 17 2002 - 20:51:57 MST
To me there seems to be a fundamental problem with the game structure. As I
understood from an (admittedly brief) skim of the paper, it went like this:
For each player:
- Get a sum of money (uneven; some players get more than others).
- Bet a sum of money (1 chance of triple money, 2 chances of lose bet)
- Choose which players to burn, and by how much.
The first two steps are totally in isolation from one player to another; one
player's bets make no effect on other players. Each player can see what is
happening for all players, however. This is meant to inform them of the
inbalance (inequity) in the game.
My problem is with the third step.
The third step displays a grid with all player's earnings, and lets each
player choose how much to burn each other player, clearly showing the effect
on the burner - the player may experiment with different options before
comitting to a decision.
The problem is this... at the third step, the players are presented only
with the option to burn. Not burning seems to be performed by burning each
player for 0.
So the experimental subject is presented with a stage in the experiment
which appears to have no purpose; it's like a trick question. The subject
must ask "why is this here? am I missing something?"
I think it is likely that many players burnt others because they felt they
were expected to do something in the third stage. After all, these
experimenters are paying cash; you want to keep them happy. Doing nothing
doesn't seem to be, well, grateful, or being a team player, or whatever.
So, I suspect that experimental subjects felt some kind of implicit pressure
from the experimenters, via this burning screen at stage three, to burn the
other players.
If such an expectation exists, then the experiment echoes the classic
experiment in which a person will administer electric shocks to another
person until they think that person has died, if an authority figure (white
lab coat) stands next to them and orders them to continue.
How would you fix this methodologically? For starters, you would make the
experimental subject make a deliberate choice to go to the burning stage,
which didn't make it feel like the "right path", but rather like a purely
optional stage.
Also, you might allow giving money to others at cost to yourself, as well as
punishment at cost to yourself. If the experimenters are correct about
burning behaviour as deliberate, the subject should seek out the punitive
option, and should choose it even in the face of being able to reward
instead.
Emlyn
> ------ Forwarded Message
> From: Kennita Watson <kennita@kennita.com>
> Date: Sat, 16 Mar 2002 12:07:45 -0800
> Subject: Research Shows Just How Much People Hate A Winner
[snip]
>
> The researchers, Professor Andrew Oswald of the University of
> Warwick and
> Dr. Daniel Zizzo of Oxford, designed a new kind of
> experiment, played with
> real cash, in which subjects could anonymously burn away
> other people s
> money -- but only at the cost of giving up some of their own.
>
> Despite this cost to themselves, and contrary to economists usual
> assumptions, 62% of those tested chose to destroy part of other test
> subjects cash. In the experiment, half of all the laboratory
> earnings were
> deliberately destroyed by fellow subjects.
[snip]
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