Preferences and constraints: The value of economic games for studying human sociality

, , ,
1 Department of Anthropology, Washington State University, Pullman, WA, United States
2 Department of Human Behavior, Ecology, and Culture, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany
3 Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
4 Department of Psychology, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, Canada
DOI
10.7287/peerj.preprints.27355v1
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
Pisor AC, Gervais MM, Purzycki BG, Ross CT. 2018. Preferences and constraints: The value of economic games for studying human sociality. PeerJ Preprints 6:e27355v1

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.

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