Competition and moral behavior: A meta-analysis of forty-five crowd-sourced experimental designs

• DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2215572120
• Publication Date: 2023-05-30T17:31:38Z
• Authors: Christoph Huber; Anna Dreber; Jürgen Huber; Magnus Johannesson; Michael Kirchler; Utz Weitzel; Miguel Abellán; Xeniya Adayeva; Fehime Ceren Ay; Kai Barron; Zachariah Berry; Werner Bönte; Katharina Brütt; Muhammed Bulutay; Pol Campos-Mercade; Eric Cardella; Maria Almudena Cl...; Gert Cornelissen; Ian G. J. Dawson; Joyce Delnoij; Elif E. Demiral; Eugen Dimant; Johannes Theodor ...; Malte Dold; Cécile Emery; Lenka Fiala; Susann Fiedler; Eleonora Freddi; Tilman Fries; Agata Gasiorowska; Ulrich Glogowsky; Paul M. Gorny; Jeremy David Gretton; Antonia Grohmann; Sebastian Hafenbrädl; Michel Handgraaf; Yaniv Hanoch; Einav Hart; Max Hennig; Stanton Hudja; Mandy Hütter; Kyle Hyndman; Konstantinos Ioan...; Ozan Isler; Sabrina Jeworrek; Daniel Jolles; Marie Juanchich; Raghabendra Prata...; Menusch Khadjavi; Tamar Kugler; Shuwen Li; Brian Lucas; Vincent Mak; Mario Mechtel; Christoph Merkle; Ethan Andrew Meyers; Johanna Mollerstrom; Alexander Nesterov; Levent Neyse; Petra Nieken; Anne-Marie Nussbe...; Helena Palumbo; Kim Peters; Angelo Pirrone; Xiangdong Qin; Rima Maria Rahal; Holger Rau; Johannes Rincke; Piero Ronzani; Yefim Roth; Ali Seyhun Saral; Jan Schmitz; Florian Schneider; Arthur Schram; Simeon Schudy; Maurice E. Schwei...; Christiane Schwieren; Irene Scopelliti; Miroslav Sirota; Joep Sonnemans; Ivan Soraperra; Lisa Spantig; Ivo Steimanis; Janina Steinmetz; Sigrid Suetens; Andriana Theodoro...; Diemo Urbig; Tobias Vorlaufer; Joschka Waibel; Daniel Woods; Ofir Yakobi; Onurcan Yilmaz; Tomasz Zaleskiewicz; Stefan Zeisberger; Felix Holzmeister
• Keywords: /dk/atira/pure/core/keywords/557389186; name=Economics; Analysts; metascience; info:eu-repo/classification/ddc/330; experimental design; 330; Competition; Economics; ddc:330; Tests; Social Sciences; 500; moral behavior; 300; Experimental design; Generalizability; Moral behavior; Transparent; Externalities; Metascience; Institute for Management Research; competition; generalizability; info:eu-repo/classification/ddc/500

Does competition affect moral behavior? This fundamental question has been debated among leading scholars for centuries, and more recently, it has been tested in experimental studies yielding a body of rather inconclusive empirical evidence. A potential source of ambivalent empirical results on the same hypothesis is design heterogeneity—variation in true effect sizes across various reasonable experimental research protocols. To provide further evidence on whether competition affects moral behavior and to examine whether the generalizability of a single experimental study is jeopardized by design heterogeneity, we invited independent research teams to contribute experimental designs to a crowd-sourced project. In a large-scale online data collection, 18,123 experimental participants were randomly allocated to 45 randomly selected experimental designs out of 95 submitted designs. We find a small adverse effect of competition on moral behavior in a meta-analysis of the pooled data. The crowd-sourced design of our study allows for a clean identification and estimation of the variation in effect sizes above and beyond what could be expected due to sampling variance. We find substantial design heterogeneity—estimated to be about 1.6 times as large as the average standard error of effect size estimates of the 45 research designs—indicating that the informativeness and generalizability of results based on a single experimental design are limited. Drawing strong conclusions about the underlying hypotheses in the presence of substantive design heterogeneity requires moving toward much larger data collections on various experimental designs testing the same hypothesis.