Bringing norms in - The role of context in experimental dictator games

Experimental economics aims to understand the foundations of human behaviors such as altruism, trust, and cooperation through controlled choice situations that enable comparison of behaviors across both individuals and societies. While games aim to elicit '' pure '' behavior by isolating it from social contexts, there is some evidence that participants bring their normative frameworks into game situations and that this might influence their behavior in games. To test this hypothesis, two versions of the dictator game, one uncontextualized and one closely resembling a local social norm, were conducted in a population of Kenyan livestock herders. Behaviors in the two versions were strikingly different; players in the contextualized game adhered closely to the social norm, while those playing the uncontextualized version exhibited a wider range of behaviors. In addition, individual demographic variables predicted behavior in the contextualized game (but not in the uncontextualized game), in contrast to the results of most earlier cross-cultural experimental work. Understanding how norms influence behavior in experiments creates new possibilities to investigate the operation and transformation of norms.