Preferences and constraints: The value of economic games for studying human sociality
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Anthropology, Evolutionary Studies, Psychiatry and Psychology
- Keywords
- economic games, experiments, human behavior, social science, field research
- Copyright
- © 2018 Pisor et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2018. Preferences and constraints: The value of economic games for studying human sociality. PeerJ Preprints 6:e27355v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.27355v1
Abstract
We argue that classic economic games and their more recent extensions should continue to play a role in fieldworkers’ methodological toolkits. Economic games are not replacements for observational and self-report studies of behavior, but rather complements to them: While observational and self-report data measure individuals’ behavior subject to the constraints of cultural institutions, competing demands on their resources, and even self-presentation bias, economic games can be designed to measure comparatively unconstrained individual preferences, or to selectively introduce constraints, providing insight into how individuals would behave under certain conditions if they had the opportunity. By using a combination of experiments, observation, and self-report, anthropologists, economists, and psychologists can continue to improve their understanding of how preferences translate into “real world” behavior, and how “real world” constraints influence preferences, across diverse human societies.
Author Comment
This paper was submitted for consideration as a comment piece at Nature Human Behaviour.