The social transmission of egoistic/prosocial behaviors (online experiment)

This experimental study aims to examine whether exposure to selfish or prosocial behavior in one monetary allocation context influences subsequent behavior in another monetary allocation context, and to assess the generality of such prosocial transfer in a large-scale online sample. Implementing the experiment online enables the recruitment of a large and diverse participant pool, providing an opportunity to examine whether prosocial behavioral transfer emerges consistently across individuals from different backgrounds. This study tests whether exposure to prosocial behavior in one context influences subsequent behavior in another, beyond simple task-specific imitation. Demonstrating such transfer at scale would support the view that prosocial behavior is guided by abstract and flexible social motivations, rather than being narrowly bound to specific economic task formats. The experiment consists of three sessions: a baseline session, an observational learning session, and a generalization session. During the observational learning session, participants will observe and predict the decisions of two demonstrators. The demonstrators will perform a money allocation task in which they choose between two discrete options for dividing a fixed amount of money between themselves and another person (a binary-choice dictator game), thereby exhibiting either prosocial (allocating more to others) or egoistic (allocating more to themselves) tendencies. While observing these behaviors and receiving feedback about the demonstrators’ choices, participants will simultaneously complete another version of a monetary dictator game, in which they decide the proportion of an endowment to allocate to another player on each trial (a percentage-based dictator game). This setup allows for a continuous, trial-by-trial assessment of participants’ own prosocial tendencies as they learn from either prosocial or egoistic conditions. In the baseline and generalization sessions, participants will perform both the binary-choice and percentage-based versions of the monetary dictator game before and after the observational learning phase. Comparing behavioral changes across sessions will allow us to assess whether prosocial or egoistic tendencies learned about others influence participants’ own decisions, and whether such influences generalize across task contexts. Together, these measures will help clarify whether prosocial learning exhibits consistency and generality in large-scale online samples and across diverse cultural contexts.