Social Preferences in the Lab: A Comparison of Students and a Representative Population
20 Pages Posted: 18 Jul 2011
Date Written: July 18, 2011
Abstract
Can lab experiments on student populations serve to identify the motivational forces present in society at large? We address this question by conducting, to our knowledge, the first study of social preferences that brings a nationally representative population into the lab, and we compare their behavior to the behavior of different student populations. Our study shows that students may not be informative of the role of social preferences in the broader population. We find that the representative participants differ fundamentally from students both in their level of selfishness and in the relative importance assigned to different moral motives. It is also interesting to note that while we do not find any substantial gender differences among the students, males and females in the representative group differ fundamentally in their moral motivation.
Keywords: social preferences, representative population, dictator game, trust game
JEL Classification: C910
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
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