Competition and moral behavior: A meta-analysis of forty-five crowd-sourced experimental designs
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In: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA), Vol. 120, No. 23, e2215572120, 06.06.2023.
Research output: Journal contributions › Journal articles › Research › peer-review
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TY - JOUR
T1 - Competition and moral behavior
T2 - A meta-analysis of forty-five crowd-sourced experimental designs
AU - Huber, Christoph
AU - Dreber, Anna
AU - Huber, Jürgen
AU - Johannesson, Magnus
AU - Kirchler, Michael
AU - Weitzel, Utz
AU - Abellán, Miguel
AU - Adayeva, Xeniya
AU - Ay, Fehime Ceren
AU - Barron, Kai
AU - Berry, Zachariah
AU - Bönte, Werner
AU - Brütt, Katharina
AU - Bulutay, Muhammed
AU - Campos-Mercade, Pol
AU - Cardella, Eric
AU - Claassen, Maria Almudena
AU - Cornelissen, Gert
AU - Dawson, Ian G.J.
AU - Delnoij, Joyce
AU - Demiral, Elif E.
AU - Dimant, Eugen
AU - Doerflinger, Johannes Theodor
AU - Dold, Malte
AU - Emery, Cécile
AU - Fiala, Lenka
AU - Fiedler, Susann
AU - Freddi, Eleonora
AU - Fries, Tilman
AU - Gasiorowska, Agata
AU - Glogowsky, Ulrich
AU - M Gorny, Paul
AU - Gretton, Jeremy David
AU - Grohmann, Antonia
AU - Hafenbrädl, Sebastian
AU - Handgraaf, Michel
AU - Hanoch, Yaniv
AU - Hart, Einav
AU - Hennig, Max
AU - Hudja, Stanton
AU - Hütter, Mandy
AU - Hyndman, Kyle
AU - Ioannidis, Konstantinos
AU - Isler, Ozan
AU - Jeworrek, Sabrina
AU - Jolles, Daniel
AU - Juanchich, Marie
AU - Kc, Raghabendra Pratap
AU - Khadjavi, Menusch
AU - Kugler, Tamar
AU - Li, Shuwen
AU - Lucas, Brian
AU - Mak, Vincent
AU - Mechtel, Mario
AU - Merkle, Christoph
AU - Meyers, Ethan Andrew
AU - Mollerstrom, Johanna
AU - Nesterov, Alexander
AU - Neyse, Levent
AU - Nieken, Petra
AU - Nussberger, Anne Marie
AU - Palumbo, Helena
AU - Peters, Kim
AU - Pirrone, Angelo
AU - Qin, Xiangdong
AU - Rahal, Rima Maria
AU - Rau, Holger
AU - Rincke, Johannes
AU - Ronzani, Piero
AU - Roth, Yefim
AU - Saral, Ali Seyhun
AU - Schmitz, Jan
AU - Schneider, Florian
AU - Schram, Arthur
AU - Schudy, Simeon
AU - Schweitzer, Maurice E.
AU - Schwieren, Christiane
AU - Scopelliti, Irene
AU - Sirota, Miroslav
AU - Sonnemans, Joep
AU - Soraperra, Ivan
AU - Spantig, Lisa
AU - Steimanis, Ivo
AU - Steinmetz, Janina
AU - Suetens, Sigrid
AU - Theodoropoulou, Andriana
AU - Urbig, Diemo
AU - Vorlaufer, Tobias
AU - Waibel, Joschka
AU - Woods, Daniel
AU - Yakobi, Ofir
AU - Yilmaz, Onurcan
AU - Zaleskiewicz, Tomasz
AU - Zeisberger, Stefan
AU - Holzmeister, Felix
N1 - Publisher Copyright: Copyright © 2023 the Author(s).
PY - 2023/6/6
Y1 - 2023/6/6
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - competition
KW - experimental design
KW - generalizability
KW - metascience
KW - moral behavior
KW - Economics
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85160653952&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - https://www.mendeley.com/catalogue/515f6889-e7e2-3490-8d52-c31b2b1dd3d4/
U2 - 10.1073/pnas.2215572120
DO - 10.1073/pnas.2215572120
M3 - Journal articles
C2 - 37252958
AN - SCOPUS:85160653952
VL - 120
JO - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA)
JF - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA)
SN - 0027-8424
IS - 23
M1 - e2215572120
ER -