Superfreakonomics_ global cooling, patri - Steven D. Levitt [55]
Or maybe, if you’re not a do-gooder, you simply don’t participate in this kind of experiment. That’s what List observed during his baseball-card study. When he was recruiting volunteers for the first round, which he clearly identified as an economics experiment, he made note of which dealers declined to participate. In the second round, when List dispatched customers to see if unwitting dealers would rip them off, he found that the dealers who declined to participate in the first round were, on average, the biggest cheaters.
Another factor that pollutes laboratory experiments is scrutiny. When a scientist brings a lump of uranium into a lab, or a mealworm or a colony of bacteria, that object isn’t likely to change its behavior just because it’s being watched by someone in a white lab coat.
For human beings, however, scrutiny has a powerful effect. Do you run a red light when there’s a police car—or, increasingly these days, a mounted camera—at the intersection? Thought not. Are you more likely to wash your hands in the office restroom if your boss is already washing hers? Thought so.
Our behavior can be changed by even subtler levels of scrutiny. At the University of Newcastle upon Tyne in England, a psychology professor named Melissa Bateson surreptitiously ran an experiment in her own department’s break room. Customarily, faculty members paid for coffee and other drinks by dropping money into an “honesty box.” Each week, Bateson posted a new price list. The prices never changed, but the small photograph atop the list did. On odd weeks, there was a picture of flowers; on even weeks, a pair of human eyes. When the eyes were watching, Bateson’s colleagues left nearly three times as much money in the honesty box. So the next time you laugh when a bird is frightened off by a silly scarecrow, remember that scarecrows work on human beings too.
How does scrutiny affect the Dictator game? Imagine you’re a student—a sophomore, probably—who volunteered to play. The professor running the experiment may stay in the background, but he’s plainly there to record which choices the participants are making. Keep in mind that the stakes are relatively low, just $20. Keep in mind also that you got the $20 just for showing up, so you didn’t work for the money.
Now you are asked if you’d like to give some of your money to an anonymous student who didn’t get $20 for free. You didn’t really want to keep all that money, did you? You may not like this particular professor; you might even actively dislike him—but no one wants to look cheap in front of somebody else. What the heck, you decide, I’ll give away a few of my dollars. But even a cockeyed optimist wouldn’t call that altruism.
In addition to scrutiny and selection bias, there’s one more factor to consider. Human behavior is influenced by a dazzlingly complex set of incentives, social norms, framing references, and the lessons gleaned from past experience—in a word, context. We act as we do because, given the choices and incentives at play in a particular circumstance, it seems most productive to act that way. This is also known as rational behavior, which is what economics is all about.
It isn’t that the Dictator participants didn’t behave in context. They did. But the lab context is unavoidably artificial. As one academic researcher wrote more than a century ago, lab experiments have the power to turn a person into “a stupid automaton” who may exhibit a “cheerful willingness to assist the investigator in every possible way by reporting to him those very things which he is most eager to find.” The psychiatrist Martin Orne warned that the lab encouraged what might best be called forced cooperation. “Just about any request which could conceivably be asked of the subject