Competition and moral behavior: a meta-analysis of forty-five crowd-sourced experimental designs
Competition and moral behavior: a meta-analysis of forty-five crowd-sourced experimental designs
Does competition affect moral behavior? This fundamental question has been debated among leading scholars for centuries, and more recently, it has been tested in experimental studies yielding a body of rather inconclusive empirical evidence. A potential source of ambivalent empirical results on the same hypothesis is design heterogeneity—variation in true effect sizes across various reasonable experimental research protocols. To provide further evidence on whether competition affects moral behavior and to examine whether the generalizability of a single experimental study is jeopardized by design heterogeneity, we invited independent research teams to contribute experimental designs to a crowd-sourced project. In a large-scale online data collection, 18,123 experimental participants were randomly allocated to 45
randomly selected experimental designs out of 95 submitted designs. We find a small adverse effect of competition on moral behavior in a meta-analysis of the pooled data. The crowd-sourced design of our study allows for a clean identification and estimation of the variation in effect sizes above and beyond what could be expected due to sampling variance. We find substantial design heterogeneity—estimated to be about 1.6 times as large as the average standard error of effect size estimates of the 45 research designs—indicating that the informativeness and generalizability of results based on a single experimental design are limited. Drawing strong conclusions about the underlying hypotheses in the presence of substantive design heterogeneity requires moving toward much larger data collections on various experimental designs testing the same hypothesis.
competition, experimental design, generalizability, metascience, moral behavior
e2215572120
Huber, Christoph
43e3c8e4-0c26-466e-b14a-b42eb587c4d8
Dreber, Anna
179f5d72-8d58-4210-af92-31ac09e88863
Huber, Jurgen
3d52b8e3-767c-4af4-bd3c-768c332cdca8
Dawson, Ian
dff1b440-6c83-4354-92b6-04809460b01a
Hanoch, Yaniv
3cf08e80-8bda-4d3b-af1c-46c858aa9f39
30 May 2023
Huber, Christoph
43e3c8e4-0c26-466e-b14a-b42eb587c4d8
Dreber, Anna
179f5d72-8d58-4210-af92-31ac09e88863
Huber, Jurgen
3d52b8e3-767c-4af4-bd3c-768c332cdca8
Dawson, Ian
dff1b440-6c83-4354-92b6-04809460b01a
Hanoch, Yaniv
3cf08e80-8bda-4d3b-af1c-46c858aa9f39
Huber, Christoph, Dreber, Anna and Huber, Jurgen
,
et al.
(2023)
Competition and moral behavior: a meta-analysis of forty-five crowd-sourced experimental designs.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120 (23), , [e2215572120].
(doi:10.1073/pnas.2215572120).
Abstract
Does competition affect moral behavior? This fundamental question has been debated among leading scholars for centuries, and more recently, it has been tested in experimental studies yielding a body of rather inconclusive empirical evidence. A potential source of ambivalent empirical results on the same hypothesis is design heterogeneity—variation in true effect sizes across various reasonable experimental research protocols. To provide further evidence on whether competition affects moral behavior and to examine whether the generalizability of a single experimental study is jeopardized by design heterogeneity, we invited independent research teams to contribute experimental designs to a crowd-sourced project. In a large-scale online data collection, 18,123 experimental participants were randomly allocated to 45
randomly selected experimental designs out of 95 submitted designs. We find a small adverse effect of competition on moral behavior in a meta-analysis of the pooled data. The crowd-sourced design of our study allows for a clean identification and estimation of the variation in effect sizes above and beyond what could be expected due to sampling variance. We find substantial design heterogeneity—estimated to be about 1.6 times as large as the average standard error of effect size estimates of the 45 research designs—indicating that the informativeness and generalizability of results based on a single experimental design are limited. Drawing strong conclusions about the underlying hypotheses in the presence of substantive design heterogeneity requires moving toward much larger data collections on various experimental designs testing the same hypothesis.
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Competition and moral behavior - A meta-analysis of forty-five crowd-sourced experimental designs
- Accepted Manuscript
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pnas.2215572120
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Accepted/In Press date: 5 April 2023
e-pub ahead of print date: 30 May 2023
Published date: 30 May 2023
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Funding Information:
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.For financial support,we thank the Austrian National Bank (grant 17788 to M. Kirchler),Austrian Science Fund (grants SFB F6307 to A.D.; SFB F6309 to J.H.; and SFB F6310 to M. Kirchler), Jan Wallander and Tom Hedelius Foundation (grant P21-0091 to A.D.),Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation (grant KAW 2018.0134 to A.D.), Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation (grant KAW2019.0434;toA.D.),RadboudUniversityNijmegen(grant2701437toU.W.), and Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (grant P21-0168 to M. Johannesson).
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Copyright © 2023 the Author(s).
Keywords:
competition, experimental design, generalizability, metascience, moral behavior
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Local EPrints ID: 477353
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/477353
ISSN: 0027-8424
PURE UUID: 0af72e7e-1ef2-42be-9dc7-2c6b7ce5e026
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Date deposited: 05 Jun 2023 16:42
Last modified: 17 Mar 2024 03:26
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Author:
Christoph Huber
Author:
Anna Dreber
Author:
Jurgen Huber
Author:
Yaniv Hanoch
Corporate Author: et al.
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