The impact of competition on moral behavior

What is it about?

Does competition affect moral behavior? In a new paper just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA the results suggest that the answer depends on who you ask - different study designs lead to different conclusions. The effects of competition on moral behavior have been debated among scholars for centuries, with inconclusive empirical results. One potential reason for this is design heterogeneity. When a researcher approaches this question with a specific design, they estimate a specific effect of the impact of competition on moral behavior. Design heterogeneity implies systematic variation in these effect sizes across different acceptable research designs carrying with it uncertainty about the informativeness of single-study results. In this large collaboration with 95 researchers from economics, psychology, and other social sciences, the goal was to explore the role of design heterogeneity. Independent research teams were invited to contribute research designs to study the effects of competition on moral behavior in an economic experiment. 45 designs were randomly chosen and more than 18,000 participants were randomized to one of these designs each. A meta-analysis of these 45 studies suggests a small but negative effect of competition on moral behavior, but there is substantial design heterogeneity. “Facing so large variation in effects across designs emphasizes that researchers should be careful about drawing generalized conclusions from a single study design,” says Christoph Huber, Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute for Markets and Strategy at WU (Vienna University of Economics and Business). The researchers also emphasize that design heterogeneity should be considered and gauged in studying other important questions to enhance the informativeness of research findings. “Our results suggest that researchers should perform much larger data collections exploring various justifiable study designs if they want to generalize effects. Team science could speed up the process of knowledge generation and should become the ‘new normal’,” says Felix Holzmeister, Assistant Professor of Behavioral Economics and Finance at University of Innsbruck. The study was led by Christoph Huber at WU (Vienna University of Economics and Business), Felix Holzmeister, Juergen Huber and Michael Kirchler at University of Innsbruck, Anna Dreber and Magnus Johannesson at the Stockholm School of Economics, and Utz Weitzel at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

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Photo by Google DeepMind on Unsplash

Photo by Google DeepMind on Unsplash