ReviewImproving the measurement of prosociality through aggregation of game behavior
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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Increasing the external validity of social preference games by reducing measurement error
2023, Games and Economic BehaviorDoes stress make us more—or less—prosocial? A systematic review and meta-analysis of the effects of acute stress on prosocial behaviours using economic games
2022, Neuroscience and Biobehavioral ReviewsCitation Excerpt :In addition, outside the laboratory, helping behaviours often involve the reduction of others’ suffering, or alleviating unpleasant states; rather than maximizing monetary wealth—as measured by the economic games used here (Crockett, 2013; Decety and Cowell, 2018; Hartmann et al., 2022; Lengersdorff et al., 2020). Thus, to better capture changes in prosocial behaviour following stress induction, we propose that future studies should employ additional measures of prosociality, or include a diverse set of measures (cf. Haesevoets et al., 2021), including measures that capture helping behaviours in everyday life more closely (Balliet et al., 2009; Galizzi and Navarro-Martinez, 2019). To this end, Forbes et al. (2022) recently demonstrated that when deciding whether to exert physical effort to obtain a reward, participants under acute stress prioritise their own rewards over those of others to a greater extent than participants in a control group.