This dissertation integrated findings from experimental games and explored general theories from various disciplines—including anthropology, economics, psychology, and sociology. The overall aim was to combine these findings and theories to provide broad insights into when and why people behave (un)ethically. In this chapter, I recapitulate the main insights of this dissertation, including its criticisms of experimental games as a research tool.
Throughout this dissertation, I have suggested that when and why people engage in (un)ethical behavior—in the real world and in experimental games—depend on several layers of interpretation, including the perception of the social situation (e.g., the experimental paradigm, context framing), individual disposition (e.g., study major, economics), and the ethical issue itself (e.g., cooperation, honesty). As outlined in Chapter 1, these interpretative layers are not independent but constitute dynamic social processes: Social situations influence individual dispositions, which are the basis of individual decision-making, which leads to individual, concrete behaviors, which become aggregated and form new social situations. I have investigated various aspects of this social framework, contributing to a broader understanding of when and why people engage in (un)ethical behavior. That is, in Chapter 2 I assessed when and why people choose to cooperate by introducing social norm theories and contrasting them to other theories on prosocial behavior, such as social preference theories. By means of meta-analyses, I demonstrated that small changes in the context framing of social dilemma games can have long-lasting effects on participants’ propensity to cooperate. Context framing also shaped beliefs about the cooperative behavior of interaction partner(s) as well as donations in dictator games that are known to correlate with cooperation. In combination, these results suggest that cooperation—and its sensitivity to context framing—can be captured by social norm theories. In Chapter 3 I extended the notion of cooperation by introducing explicit sanctions, in the form of costly third-party punishment. The goal was to understand why economics students behave more selfishly than other students. It was demonstrated that economics students and other students
had a similar understanding of fairness in the particular experimental game. However, economics students were more skeptical about the cooperativeness of their interaction partners. This skepticism in turn partly mediated their lower willingness to comply with a shared fairness norm. In Chapter 4 I demonstrated that sanctions need not be explicit for ethical behavior to emerge. Instead, implicit and intrinsic sanctions—psychological costs, for example, shame and guilt—can help explain why people refrain from (dis)honest behavior. The level of the (dis)honest behavior thereby strongly depended on several elements, including the experimental paradigm, situational factors, such as the investigative setting and incentives, and personal factors, such as gender, age, and study major.
This dissertation not only built on experimental games, it was also a work of methodological criticism of experimental games. As explained in Chapter 1, experimental games are a promising approach for studying the social framework of (un)ethical behavior. Nonetheless, experimental games have several disadvantages that are worth noting. For example, in Chapter 2 I criticized the idea of “clean” experimental design in studies with human subjects. I argued that participants always bring their own interpretation into the experiment and that this interpretation should not be seen as a source of noise but as an essential element of human cognition. In Chapter 3 I criticized the conventional practice of sampling from highly unrepresentative participant pools.
Economics student behave systematically differently compared to students of other majors. Conclusions drawn from experiments with primarily economics students therefore may be inadequate for generalization to other population groups, even to other students. In Chapter 4 I again addressed the question of generalizability, showing that most participant pools in studies on dishonest behavior are far from representative. For instance, widely discussed effects, such as gender differences in dishonesty, are largely based on student samples. I also showed that conclusions about when people behave (dis)honestly partly depend on the specific experimental game. Moreover, I criticized that some experimental games are ill-defined because they leave the unethical consequences of dishonest behavior ambiguous.
In sum, using experimental games to examine the (un)ethical behavior of people is a boon and a bane. On the one hand, experimental games prompt many new questions, such as: How do participants interpret the experimental game (Butler et al., 2011; Gerkey, 2013)? Do individuals behave differently when payoffs are larger than the usual “fistful of dollars” (Hoffman, McCabe, & Smith, 1996a)? How do experimenters influence the
behavior of their participants (Bischoff & Frank, 2011)? Overall, it is worth emphasizing that experimental games are, by definition, highly artificial situations that feature aspects rarely observed in natural environments (e.g., “clean” frames; windfall money: Cherry, 2001). It is important to keep these limitations in mind when generalizing insights from experimental games.
On the other hand, experimental games are a highly rigorous investigative tool for studies that tap into the mechanisms of the social framework (cf. Chapter 1).
Experimental games, for example, are repeatable encounters, allow straightforward quantification of social behaviors, and provide a taxonomy of social situations. Hence, experimental games can serve as a promising building block for (re)connecting insights from the social and behavioral sciences in an academic world of increasingly isolated disciplines. Formulating general theories and synthesizing empirical findings are essential to a holistic understanding of (un)ethical behavior. I hope to have made a modest contribution toward this ambition.