Not logged in.

Quick Search - Contribution

Contribution Details

Type Journal Article
Scope Discipline-based scholarship
Title Competition and moral behavior: A meta-analysis of forty-five crowd-sourced experimental designs
Organization Unit
Authors
  • Christoph Huber
  • Anna Dreber
  • Jürgen Huber
  • Magnus Johannesson
  • Michael Kirchler
  • Utz Weitzel
  • Miguel Abellán
  • Xeniya Adayeva
  • Fehime Ceren Ay
  • Kai Barron
  • Zachariah Berry
  • Werner Bönte
  • Katharina Brütt
  • Muhammed Bulutay
  • Pol Campos-Mercade
  • Eric Cardella
  • Maria Almudena Claassen
  • Gert Cornelissen
  • Ian G J Dawson
  • Joyce Delnoij
  • Elif E Demiral
  • Eugen Dimant
  • Johannes Theodor Doerflinger
  • Malte Dold
  • Cécile Emery
  • Lenka Fiala
  • Susann Fiedler
  • Eleonora Freddi
  • Tilman Fries
  • Stefan Zeisberger
Item Subtype Original Work
Refereed Yes
Status Published in final form
Language
  • English
Journal Title Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
Publisher National Academy of Sciences
Geographical Reach international
ISSN 0027-8424
Volume 120
Number 23
Page Range e22155721
Date 2023
Abstract Text 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.
Free access at DOI
Digital Object Identifier 10.1073/pnas.2215572120
Other Identification Number merlin-id:24260
PDF File Download from ZORA
Export BibTeX
EP3 XML (ZORA)