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

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Article
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Abstract

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.

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Keywords
competition, experimental design, generalizability, metascience, moral behavior
Journal Title
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of USA
Conference Name
Journal ISSN
0027-8424
1091-6490
Volume Title
120
Publisher
National Academy of Sciences
Sponsorship
For financial support, we thank the Austrian National Bank (grant 17788 to M. Kirchler), Austrian Science Fund (grants SFB F6307 to A.D.; SFB F6309 to J.H.; and SFB F6310 to M. Kirchler), Jan Wallander and Tom Hedelius Foundation (grant P21-0091 to A.D.), Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation (grant KAW 2018.0134 to A.D.), Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation (grant KAW 2019.0434; to A.D.), Radboud University Nijmegen (grant 2701437 to U.W.), and Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (grant P21-0168 to M. Johannesson).