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In the second version, List gave Annika another option: she could still give Zelda any amount of her money but, if she preferred, she could instead take $1 from Zelda. If the dictators were altruistic, this tweak to the game shouldn’t matter at all; it should only affect the people who otherwise would have given nothing. All List did was expand the dictator’s “choice set” in a way that was irrelevant for all but the stingiest of players.

But only 35 percent of the Annikas in this modified, steal-a-dollar-if-you-want version gave any money to Zelda. That was just half the number who gave in the original Dictator. Nearly 45 percent, meanwhile, didn’t give a penny, while the remaining 20 percent took a dollar from Zelda.

Hey, what happened to all the altruism?

But List didn’t stop there. In the third version, Annika was told that Zelda had been given the same amount of money that she, Annika, was given. And Annika could steal Zelda’s entire payment—or, if she preferred, she could give Zelda any portion of her own money.

What happened? Now only 10 percent of the Annikas gave Zelda any money, while more than 60 percent of the Annikas took from Zelda. More than 40 percent of the Annikas took all of Zelda’s money. Under List’s guidance, a band of altruists had suddenly—and quite easily—been turned into a gang of thieves.

The fourth and final version of List’s experiment was identical to the third—the dictator could steal the other player’s entire pile of money—but with one simple twist. Instead of being handed some money to play the game, as is standard in such lab experiments, Annika and Zelda first had to work for it. (List needed some envelopes stuffed for another experiment, and with limited research funds he was killing two birds with one stone.)

After they worked, it was time to play. Annika still had the option of taking all of Zelda’s money, as more than 60 percent of the Annikas did in the previous version. But now, with both players having earned their money, only 28 percent of the Annikas took from Zelda. Fully two-thirds of the Annikas neither gave nor took a penny.

So what had John List done, and what does it mean?

He upended the conventional wisdom on altruism by introducing new elements to a clever lab experiment to make it look a bit more like the real world. If your only option in the lab is to give away some money, you probably will. But in the real world, that is rarely your only option. The final version of his experiment, with the envelope-stuffing, was perhaps most compelling. It suggests that when a person comes into some money honestly and believes that another person has done the same, she neither gives away what she earned nor takes what doesn’t belong to her.

But what about all the prizewinning behavioral economists who had identified altruism in the wild?

“I think it’s pretty clear that most people are misinterpreting their data,” List says. “To me, these experiments put the knife in it. It’s certainly not altruism we’ve been seeing.”

List had painstakingly worked his way up from truck driver’s son to the center of an elite group of scholars who were rewriting the rules of economic behavior. Now, in order to stay true to his scientific principles, he had to betray them. As word of his findings began to trickle out, he suddenly became, as he puts it, “clearly the most hated guy in the field.”

List can at least be consoled by knowing that he is almost certainly correct. Let’s consider some of the forces that make such lab stories unbelievable.

The first is selection bias. Think back to the tricky nature of doctor report cards. The best cardiologist in town probably attracts the sickest and most desperate patients. So if you’re keeping score solely by death rate, that doctor may get a failing grade even though he is excellent.

Similarly, are the people who volunteer to play Dictator more cooperative than average? Quite likely yes. Scholars long before John List pointed out that behavioral experiments