Increasing the external validity of social preference games by reducing measurement error

Abstract

An increasing number of studies call into question the external validity of social preference games. In this paper, we show that these games have a low correlation with single pro-social behaviors in the field, but this correlation can be substantially increased by aggregating behaviors to reduce measurement error. We tracked people's daily pro-social behaviors for 14 days using a day reconstruction method; the same people played three different social preference games on seven different occasions. We show that, as more pro-social behaviors and game rounds are aggregated, the games become much better predictors of pro-sociality. This predictive power is further increased by using statistical methods designed to better account for measurement error. These findings suggest that social preference games capture important underlying dispositions of real-world pro-sociality, and they can be successfully used to predict aggregated pro-social inclinations. This has crucial implications for the external validity and applicability of economic games.