This paper argues that the debate about the validity of results of the DG and related games is stymied by the ambiguities that surround the concept of reactivity, as there are a number of unresolved conceptual issues regarding the phenomenon of reactivity. Can the DG results be used to explain phenomena outside the lab, and if so, which are those phenomena? Can we use the DG results to explain why people do things like give money to charities or is the behavior of DG players only meaningful (and relevant) inside the lab? There remains an open question regarding what can be inferred, if anything, from subjects’ behavior in the standard DG or its variants. Alternatively, others have argued that relevant inferences from the DG and other similarly abstract games are still possible: both in the lab and in the field, subjects' behavior depends on other people's expectations and thus the DG provides a useful setting to study how subjects choose to adhere to the normative cues that the experimental setting provides (Levitt and List 2007, Jimenez-Buedo and Guala 2016).ĭespite the shadow of the artifact over the DG, the game continues to be enacted in the growing number of social science experimental labs that have been set up in the last few years, coinciding with the extraordinary growth of experimental methods across the social scientific disciplines.
In this way, and according to critics, players in the DG are merely trying to perform the role of “good subjects” by adjusting their behavior to expectations, or, more specifically, adjusting to what they think it is expected of them as subjects (Bardsley 2008 Zizzo 2010). While the standard DG results, in which a number of “dictators” share their money with complete strangers has traditionally been interpreted widely as evidence of prosocial behavior, a number of important works that came out around the same time started disputing this interpretation, and instead suggested that the high level of donations observed was more likely indicative of the existence of artefacts: thus, for authors such as Bardsley ( 2008), Zizzo ( 2010), Dana et al ( 2007), and List ( 2007), the fact that a majority of DG subjects were willing to share a significant amount of their endowments with their fellow players was because the game was too transparently "about giving", and thus experimental subjects could easily guess what was expected of them and acted accordingly. In particular, the question of reactivity, under its multiple conceptual variants, has gained the attention of important experimentalists regarding the Dictator Game (DG) Footnote 1 and other similarly abstract designs aimed at measuring the normative inclinations of subjects. Following this developments, a corresponding interest in the problem of reactivity has ensued among experimental economists. More recently, experimental economists gradually moved in their study toward topics in which economic incentives no longer dominated the structure of a given game, but instead were intermingled with normative considerations (such as in the study of altruism, punishment, or social norms). With their clear-cut methodological stance shaped most importantly by a tenacious control over the incentives faced by participants in the experimental setting, experimental economists may have initially felt that their experiments were shielded from the worries associated with subjects’ reactivity that had long haunted their fellow social psychologist experimenters. In the first few decades after the emergence of new experimental practices in the social sciences, then, the question of reactivity, or the phenomenon that occurs when individuals alter their behavior because of their awareness of being studied, has not been central to the discussions of methodologists or practitioners, partly because economists were not crucially concerned by it. It is natural then that the methodological discussions around new experimental practices in the social sciences have often been shaped by the debates that were taking place among practicing experimental economists. The surge in social scientific experimentation of the last years has been in great part driven by the success of experimental and behavioral economics.