Figure 5
Dictator Behavior for Money as a Function of Default Allocations.
For each plot a single data point represents a mean choice probability across 25 participants; error bars are 95% confidence intervals around the mean, generated by re-sampling the data 100,000 times with replacement. (a) The probability (in the Take frame) that dictators chose to take £6 from the receiver, as opposed to leaving the offer unchanged, is plotted as a function of the initial net (default) offer, indicated by green diamonds. Also plotted is the probability (in the Give frame) that dictators chose to give £6 of debt to the receiver, indicated by the purple triangles. In both cases, dictators were increasingly likely to reduce the offer as the initial offer increased, consistent with there being an increasing marginal cost to having less money than the receiver. (b) The probability (in the Give frame) that dictators chose to give £6 to the receiver, as opposed to leaving the offer unchanged, is plotted as a function of the net default offer, indicated by green squares. Also plotted is the probability (in the Take frame) that dictators chose to take £6 of debt from the receiver, indicated by purple circles. In both cases, dictators were increasingly likely to increase the offer as the initial offer decreased, consistent with an increasing marginal cost to having more money than the receiver. Similarly, in the Give or Take frame, the probability that dictators chose to decrease the net offer by £6, either by taking money (
) or giving debt (
) increased as the initial offer increased (c) and the probability that dictators chose to increase the net offer by £6, either by giving money (
) or taking debt (
) decreased as the initial offer increased (d). A tendency towards self-oriented choices is evident from the greater propensity to decrease rather than increase offers, for the same degree of inequality.
