70-386 Behavioral Decision Making

70-386Behavioral Decision Making Lecture 17: WEIRD Subjects

Paper Presentation

Administrative • Tuesday: Nudges and policy issues (policy ≠ political) • Final Exam Thursday • FCEs • Currently 8/13 of you responded. • If 11/13 respond by the beginning of class on Tuesday, I’ll post one of the exam’s essay questions by Tuesday night, for you to think about before the exam.

Last Time • Simultaneous move games • “prisoner’s dilemma” • Common interest coordination games • And some less common interest • Signaling

So what? • Are these behaviors “biases”? • No… not in the same way as Heuristics and Biases. • Not so much System 1 vs System 2 with these results. • There are biases at play – like in negotiation exercises, etc. • Maybe it’s just different preferences. • People prefer “fairer” allocations.

Experiments and Randomization Standard inference using experiments requires a few things but two in particular: • Random assignment to treatment • A representative population Point (1) is what is normally the focus of discussion, since it’s often hard to do. But (2) is often a big limitation that no one talks about.

WEIRD Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic Yes, I’m weird. (as if there was really a question…) Almost everything we know about social science is based on WEIRD subjects. • And mostly WEIRD subjects between the ages of 18-22! Who are disproportionately likely to student a social science topic. • What happened to Random Sampling?!

Subject pools Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan (2010) presents a meta study on many of the findings we’ve discussed • From 2003-2007, 96% of subjects in the studies published in top Psych journals were from Western countries. (Arnett 2008) • 2/3’s of American samples used in articles in JPSP were composed of solely undergraduates • American undergrad 4000 times more likely to be a research participant than a person outside the West.

Does it matter? • Maybe? • Most say NO. • The skeptic in me says they have a strong incentive to say “NO” • But honestly we really don’t know because there have been few replications in non-WEIRD societies. • The bigger problem is that we don’t have much of a theoretical basis to predict differences (at least in econ and psych)

What is a Social Science Theory?

An example • Interesting experiments running the Ultimatum and Dictator Games in small, tribal, communities: • Dictator Game:

An example • Ultimatum Game, offers:

An example • Ultimatum Game, acceptance rates: • Even some evidence of rejecting “more than fair” offers (>80% of pie)

Not Just Games • Fundamental Attribution Error • Might not be so “fundamental:” • Americans attend to dispositions at the expense of situations (Gilbert & Malone 1995) • East Asians more likely to infer that behaviors are strongly controlled by the situation • Any others that we’ve discussed in that class that might be different? • Would there be a difference if we ran the experiments on Education City vs Qatar University?

So does it make a difference? • Maybe? • Again, the problem is that we don’t have much of a theoretical basis to predict differences • What’s the mechanism? • Left to Right search vs Right to Left is well defined. • Is the group different than that one, isn’t well defined. How is it different? Why?

70-386 Behavioral Decision Making