Social Distance and Other-Regarding Behavior in Dictator Games: Comment

TLDR

Experiments on bargaining, public goods, and trust consistently reveal substantial other‑regarding behavior, and HMS (1996) explain deviations from game‑theoretic predictions by showing that decreasing social distance activates individuals’ knowledge of social norms and reciprocity, turning anonymous others into identifiable victims. This comment challenges HMS’s conclusion by arguing that social distance affects other‑regardingness independently of reciprocity norms. The authors test this by running dictator games with varied social distance,.

Abstract

A surprisingly large amount of otherregarding behavior is the common finding of experiments on bargaining, public goods, and trust. Elizabeth Hoffman et al. ( hereafter, HMS ) ( 1996 ) have provided an insightful analysis of why experimental results deviate from game theoretic predictions in dictator games. The authors conclude that individuals’ dispositional knowledge about social norms and reciprocity is activated by decreasing social distance even though the dictator game explicitly excludes reciprocal sanctioning possibilities by experimental design. We challenge this conclusion. While HMS (p. 654) define social distance to be ‘‘the degree of reciprocity that subjects believe exist within a social interaction,’’ we argue that social distance influences otherregardedness independent of any norms of social exchange. When social distance decreases, the ‘‘other’’ is no longer some unknown individual from some anonymous crowd but becomes an ‘‘identifiable victim’’ (Thomas C. Schelling 1968). In order to discriminate between reciprocity-based and identifiabilitybased other-regardedness, we also used the dictator game and varied the degree of social distance. An anonymous treatment is com-