A positive effect of flowers rather than eye images in a large-scale, cross-cultural dictator game

Abstract

People often consider how their behaviour will be viewed by others, and may cooperate to avoid gaining a bad reputation. Sensitivity to reputation may be elicited by subtle social cues of being watched: previous studies have shown that people behave more cooperatively when they see images of eyes rather than control images. Here, we tested whether eye images enhance cooperation in a dictator game, using the online labour market Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT). In contrast to our predictions and the results of most previous studies, dictators gave away more money when they saw images of flowers rather than eye images. Donations in response to eye images were not significantly different to donations under control treatments. Dictator donations varied significantly across cultures but there was no systematic variation in responses to different image types across cultures. Unlike most previous studies, players interacting via AMT may feel truly anonymous when making decisions and, as such, may not respond to subtle social cues of being watched. Nevertheless, dictators gave away similar amounts as in previous studies, so anonymity did not erase helpfulness. We suggest that eye images might only promote cooperative behaviour in relatively public settings and that people may ignore these cues when they know their behaviour is truly anonymous.

Figure 1.

Histogram of dictator donations ($).

Figure 2.

Boxplot of image type (eyes/flowers/control) against dictator donation ($). Boxplots display median values (solid lines) with inter-quartile ranges (upper and lower limits of the boxes). The maximum and minimum values of the data range are indicated by the dashed bars. Outliers are indicated with circles. Plots are generated from raw data and do not control for other significant terms affecting dictator donations.

Figure 3.

Scatterplot of dictator donations ($) according to self-reported age. Points represent raw data points and are not corrected for additional significant terms affecting dictator donations.

Figure 4.

Boxplot of dictator donation ($) according to world culture. See figure 2 legend for description of how data are presented. Plots are generated from raw data and do not control for other significant terms affecting dictator donations.