Prosocial personality traits and sources of behavioral heterogeneity in economic games

© 2017 Dr. Kun ZhaoPersonality psychology and economics both involve the study of behavioral heterogeneity and its consistencies across time and situations, although there has been little convergence between the two fields until recently. This thesis is a collection of studies investigating the role of prosocial traits from comprehensive taxonomic models of personality in economic games modeling social interactions. These include the politeness and compassion aspects of Big Five agreeableness (DeYoung, Quilty, & Peterson, 2007) and honesty-humility and agreeableness from the HEXACO model (Lee & Ashton, 2004). The studies in the first half of this thesis focused on the dictator game, a simple task of costly resource allocation used to measure prosociality (Forsythe, Horowitz, Savin, & Sefton, 1994; Kahneman, Knetsch, & Thaler, 1986). The dictator game is well-known for yielding considerable variation in behavior, making it an ideal hunting ground for studying personality. In Chapter 2, four studies (Studies 1–4, combined N = 798) using both hypothetical scenarios and incentivized games revealed that honesty-humility and politeness each uniquely predicted fair allocations of wealth to others. These findings corroborate a long-held view in economics that prosocial behavior is a function of norm adherence and good manners, rather than emotional concern for others. They also challenge the use and interpretation of the dictator game as an index of “altruism”. These findings may reflect the fact that the standard dictator game is a de-contextualized task involving windfall sharing between strangers. The next two chapters examined the situational characteristics giving rise to different trait effects: the framing of the game as giving or taking (Chapter 3, Studies 5–6, combined N = 449) and the salience of contextual norms around distributive justice (Chapter 4, Study 7, N = 707). They showed that both politeness and compassion predicted allocations of wealth when these were embedded within norms of equity and need. Furthermore, stronger and more consistent effects for prosocial personality traits were observed when the dictator game was framed as taking, rather than giving, pointing to a “do-no-harm” explanation of the aversion to taking. The studies in the second half of this thesis moved beyond the dictator game to examine a broader range of social preferences and behaviors. Chapter 5 (Studies 8–9, combined N = 560) consisted of multiple games providing evidence for generosity and positive reciprocity, which were differentially related to personality traits. Chapter 6 (Study 10, N = 340) revealed that compassion (but not politeness nor honesty-humility) uniquely predicted third-party recompensation and punishment following violations of fairness norms. Together, the studies show that prosocial traits are important driving forces of behavioral heterogeneity in economic games modeling social interactions. However, the expression of these traits depended on context, varying across acts of costly versus costless prosociality, active versus reactive cooperation, giving versus taking frames, and acts of sharing versus helping, often in line with their theoretical bases. Notably, the findings suggest a double dissociation consisting of two separate other-regarding tendencies: an inhibitive tendency driving adherence to fairness norms (i.e., politeness, honesty-humility; “Good Citizen” traits) and a proactive tendency driving responses to norm violations (i.e., compassion; “Good Samaritan” traits). The findings have broader implications for understanding the structure of personality taxonomies, the multiple dimensions of prosociality, and the motivations contained within the social interactions modeled in economic games. They demonstrate the value of combining theoretical predictions from personality psychology with behavioral paradigms from economics. As with any inter-disciplinary approach, they also raise new questions and challenges that remain important considerations as the two research traditions move closer together