How Procedural and Instructional Manipulation Affect People’s Social Exchange Behavior

Hoffman et al.’s Article Summary
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Hoffman et al.’s Article Summary
Hoffman et al.’s “Social Distance and Other-Regarding Behavior in Dictator Games” portrays how procedural and instructional manipulation affect people’s social exchange behavior. The primary research question was how social isolation and procedural manipulation in the dictator games influenced individuals’ willingness to share their allocated $10. In particular, dictator games are crucial in studying fairness. They control people’s strategic behavior in ultimatum games. The main hypothesis is that a sense of coupling or social distance between dictators and their counterparts affects how the $10 is shared. For instance, Paraguay’s Ache hunter-gatherers do not share low-risk food sources beyond immediate family members, but high-risk meat products obtained through hunting, where a hunter has a 40% chance of returning home empty-handed, are broadly shared (Hoffman et al., 1996). The purpose of this paper is to summarize Hoffman et al.’s article and suggest research questions for future research.
The method used in the dictator games’ experiments constituted six stages. Specifically, Double Blind 1 (DB1) involved 15 participants (dictators) who were recruited and placed in room A and the other 14 respondents in room B. All subjects were paid $5 for participating. The experimenter offered 14 envelopes. Twelve of them had 10 blank paper slips and 10 one-dollar bills, and 2 envelopes had 20 blank paper slips (Hoffman et al., 1996). Participants from room A were called one at a time and handed an opaque envelope. They went behind a large cardboard box at the back and decided how many one-dollar bills to take and leave for their counterparts in room B. More emphasis was on subjects’ privacy and social isolation conditions. The same procedure was repeated in Double Blind 2 (DB2), Single Blind 1 (SB1), and Single Blind 2 (SB2) (Hoffman et al., 1996). However, the experimenter manipulated social distance and privacy conditions in every stage to determine how they influenced the sharing behaviors of dictators.
The results indicate that the offer distribution decreased as experimenters weakened the social isolation or anonymity conditions. In particular, the Jonchkeere nonparametric test statistic was 3.77 (Hoffman et al., 1996). In ultimatum games, researchers concluded that fairness does not contribute to anomalous behavior. About 62% of the dictators gave $2 and above to their counterparts (Hoffman et al., 1996). They manipulated the social distance between the experimenter and dictator and the potential reciprocity degree between ex...