Old age and prosocial behavior: Social preferences or experimental confounds?Sara Elisa Kettner and Israel Waichman () Journal of Economic Psychology, 2016, vol. 53, issue C, 118-130 Abstract: Experimental and field evidence indicate a positive link between social preferences and age, most strikingly between the elderly and young adults. However, it is possible that the seemingly positive link between age and preferences stems from confounds in experimental procedure. In a dictator game study we find that elderly participants do indeed transfer higher shares of their endowments to their peers than a standard sample of student participants. This result holds good even in treatments accounting for wealth differences and experimenter demand effects. However, we observe no difference in behavior when we compare elderly participants and students who have not previously participated in economic experiments. Accordingly, it is possible that the seemingly stronger social preferences of the elderly are due to confounds associated with lack of experience with economic experiments. In addition, when comparing incentivized and hypothetical transfer decisions, we observe a hypothetical bias in treatments with a “take” framing, but not in treatments with the standard “give” framing. Keywords: Social preferences; Participant pool; Dictator game; Age; Experimenter demand effect; Hypothetical bias (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:joepsy:v:53:y:2016:i:c:p:118-130 DOI: 10.1016/j.joep.2016.01.003 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Economic Psychology is currently edited by G. Antonides and D. Read More articles in Journal of Economic Psychology from Elsevier |
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