Elsevier

Current Opinion in Psychology

Volume 44, April 2022, Pages 237-244
Current Opinion in Psychology

Review
Improving the measurement of prosociality through aggregation of game behavior

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2021.09.018Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Most prior social dilemma research used single instances of game behavior.

  • We show that different types of aggregation can increase behavioral consistency.

  • Aggregation can also boost the link between game behavior and other variables.

  • These findings illustrate that economic games indeed measure a core of prosociality.

  • We strongly recommend future research to use aggregated game responses.

Abstract

Prior research has found that people’s choices in economic games are often only modestly related to their prosocial personality traits and to mundane prosocial behaviors. The present article reviews the recent literature showing that the strength of these relationships depends on the level of aggregation. Specifically, we demonstrate an increase in behavioral consistency after horizontal aggregation (across multiple game types), vertical aggregation (across multiple game variants), and a combination thereof. Moreover, we show that aggregation increases the magnitude of the relationships of game behavior with prosocial personality and mundane prosocial behavior. These findings illustrate that economic games can genuinely capture a core facet of human prosociality — but that their capacity for doing so is greater when multiple game behaviors are considered.

Introduction

Social dilemmas are situations in which collective interests are at odds with selfish interests [1, 2, 3, 4]. Such situations include many of the principal challenges of our time, including climate change [5] and pandemic mitigation [6]. To investigate behavior in social dilemmas empirically, scholars have modeled these situations into so-called economic games in which people have to choose between cooperative (reflecting a prosocial choice) and defective (reflecting a proself choice) alternatives [7,8]. This approach has resulted in an extensive range of games that are used to model social dilemma situations [9,10], and to understand people’s actions within them. Moreover, such games are used to derive possible resolutions through which mundane forms of prosocial behavior may be promoted. Prosocial behavior covers a broad range of actions intended to benefit one or more people other than oneself [11].

Although research on economic games has yielded a wealth of insight into how people act in such experimental settings (e.g. [4, 9, 10]), several previous studies failed to report large1 associations between people’s behavior in different economic games and their prosocial personality and prosocial behavior in mundane settings (i.e. real-life prosocial behaviors such as donating blood and volunteering). An important limitation of many prior studies in this domain, however, is that they typically relied on individual game behaviors — that is, for the most, they focus on a single, particular game type, presented in one specific version, often played in a one-shot manner [13,14].

In this article, we argue that this particular approach can possibly explain the rather modest and varying associations of game behavior with prosocial personality and real-life prosocial behaviors that have been observed in much prior research. More specifically, we suggest that aggregating choices within and across a broader range of settings increases the reliability of game-based measures and, thereby, also boosts the correlations with both trait prosociality and prosocial behavior outside of the laboratory. We begin this review with a brief discussion of the aggregation principle. Next, we provide a detailed review of recent research on the consistency of people’s choices in game-based social dilemmas and their link with prosocial personality and mundane forms of prosocial behavior.

Section snippets

The aggregation principle

Imagine assessing students’ course performance with a single multiple-choice item. Most people would agree that in such a case the use of a single-item measure would probably result in an unreliable measurement. Yet, within the social dilemma literature, it is common practice to measure game behavior with only one single trial of one particular game (e.g. a single trial of a Prisoner’s Dilemma). This overlooks the notion; however, that choice behavior in economic games may be strongly shaped

Behavioral consistency in social dilemma games

Generally speaking, this article is a methodological critique of the way in which game behavior has been measured in ample prior social dilemma research. In what follows, evidence is presented that this research domain has been limited by the tendency to focus on choice behavior in isolated games (e.g. within a single game type or game variant; often in just a single interaction or a single game trial), instead of aggregating multiple game behaviors. We distinguish between three types of

Conclusion

To study people’s reactions in social dilemmas as precisely as possible, an extensive range of economic games have been developed, which have been studied in a broad range of variants. Although understanding choice behavior within specific game types or game variants can be useful for understanding people’s reactions within that particular setting, behavior within isolated games (i.e. within a single game type, a single game variant, or even a single interaction) can only be modestly related to

Funding

This research was supported by Grant BOF.PDO.2017.0017.01 of the Special Research Fund (BOF, Bijzonder Onderzoeksfonds) of Ghent University.

Author contributions

TH, CRF, and AVH developed the research idea together. TH conducted the analyses. TH wrote a first draft of the article; thereafter CRF and AVH revised the first draft.

Conflict of interest statement

Nothing declared.

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