Document Type
Article
Publication Date
11-5-2025
Abstract
This study examines group-conditional generosity and behavior using students from Chapman University in the United States and Wuhan University in China. Participants make allocation decisions in either a standard Dictator Game (DG) or a Lying Dictator Game (LDG), where a privately reported die roll determines the allocation. We vary whether participants interact with members of their own or the other university community. The LDG game, through the possibility of plausible deniability, allows for the moderation of image concerns that potentially influence DG behavior. We complement these tasks with individual decision benchmarks that exclude the Receiver to control for group differences in lying aversion. We find no evidence of in-group favoritism in either the DG or LDG, although Chapman participants allocate more to in-group Receivers than do Wuhan participants. Plausible deniability changes allocation distributions, but not in the predicted direction of lower generosity. The individual decision tasks show that private reporting behavior differs across the two samples and that introducing a Receiver shifts behavior in an other-regarding direction.
Recommended Citation
Berman, A., Cer Askin, S., Jiang, S., Porter, D., & Shachat, J. (2025). Dictators and Lying Dictators: An experimental investigation of preference based-group biases in Chinese and American interactions. ESI Working Paper 25-12. https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/esi_working_papers/426/
Comments
ESI Working Paper 25-12