The paper investigates the case of social preferences: do hypothetical rewards elicit different social behaviour than real but small monetary rewards in online experiments?
To answer this more precisely, the Universidad Loyola Andalucia team have conducted an online Dictator Game experiment in which 1,195 participants decided how to split £1 with another participant (63% female, average age 32.2).
Unexpectedly, no significant differences have been found in average giving across treatments. Donation is less dispersed in the hypothetical treatment, since participants’ choices tend to concentrate more around the egalitarian distribution. The likelihood of making purely selfish decisions does not differ across treatments either, whereas hyper-generous choices are more common in monetary schemes than in hypothetical one. All these findings go in general against expectations.