Key Lab of Behavioral Science, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
PLoS One. 2013 Aug 14;8(8):e70769. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0070769. eCollection 2013.
Can traces of rapid socio-economic changes within a society be reflected in experimental games? The post-Mao reforms in China provide a unique natural quasi-experiment to study people from the same society who were raised with radically different values about distribution of wealth and altruistic behavior. We tested whether the size of offers in the ultimatum and dictator games are an increasing function of the number of years Chinese citizens experienced of the Mao era ("planned economy"). For the cohort that lived throughout the entire Mao era, we found that mean offers in the two games were substantially higher than what is typically offered in laboratory studies. These offers were also higher than those of two younger Chinese cohorts. In general, the amount offered decreased with less time spent under Mao, while in the oldest group in which every member spent the same amount of time under Mao, the younger members tended to offer more, suggesting an additional effect of early education under Mao and contradicting the alternative hypothesis that generosity increases with age. These results suggest that some of the observed individual differences in the offers made in experimental games can be traced back to the values of the socio-economic era in which individuals grew up.
社会中的快速社会经济变化能否在实验游戏中反映出来？中国的后毛泽东改革提供了一个独特的自然准实验，以研究来自同一社会的人，他们在财富分配和利他行为方面有着截然不同的价值观。我们测试了中国人经历毛泽东时代（“计划经济”）的年数是否是最后通牒和独裁者游戏中报价大小的递增函数。对于经历过整个毛泽东时代的那一代人，我们发现这两个游戏中的平均报价远高于实验室研究中通常提供的报价。这些报价也高于另外两个年轻的中国群体。总的来说，提供的金额随着在毛泽东时代的时间减少而减少，而在其中每个成员都在毛泽东时代度过相同时间的最年长群体中，年轻成员往往会提供更多，这表明在毛泽东时代接受的早期教育有额外的影响，这与慷慨程度随年龄增长的替代假设相矛盾。这些结果表明，实验游戏中提出的报价的一些观察到的个体差异可以追溯到个人成长的社会经济时代的价值观。
