The Daily Post at WordPress.com

Topic #183: Are you happy or sad the Space Shuttle has been retired? What do you think the next goal for humans in space should be, and what do you think Russia and China, the new leaders, will do next? Is it important enough to get funding before other needs?

I’m actually pretty glad that the Space Shuttle has been retired and we’re not going to waste any more money sending stuff into space. I don’t have enough background knowledge about the Space Shuttle project to know what good it’s for, but at the point America is right now, we don’t need to waste money on extraneous things.

Stopping the Space Shuttle mission might save us enough money to delay the amount of time before we fall so deep in debt to China that they pretty much own us.

My Homework for Your Reading Pleasure

This is a thought paper I wrote today for extra credit for my abnormal psychology course. Thought papers are basically papers about anything psychology-related that make us think. The topic of my first thought paper is the ultimatum game.

A few days ago, I got a $350.00 check in the mail as payment for completing a psychology research experiment about two months ago, back when I was in Madison for this past academic year. I forgot that I was supposed to be expecting my payment, and it was a nice surprise when I opened up a letter and found a check inside. Getting the check reminded me of one of the many small tasks I did as part of the experiment, an economics game of altruism called the ultimatum game.

If you don’t know what the ultimatum game is, it’s simple – the experimenter gives you $10 and you get to decide how to split the money with another participant. Then you present the proposal to the other participant, and the other participant can either accept or reject the offer. If the other participant accepts the offer, you both get to keep the money in the proposed proportions. If the other participant rejects the offer, you both get nothing.

Following basic economic theory, the person deciding how to split the money should keep $9 for him or herself in order to optimize gain, and give $1 to the other participant. The other participant should theoretically accept any offer, regardless of what it is, because some money is better than no money.

And of course, that’s not how things actually turn out.

Most people doing the splitting of the money don’t decide to keep $9 and give $1. Instead, they usually split the $10 50-50 or 60-40. This means that instead of maximizing personal gain, people will freely give a greater-than-minimum amount of money to others. When experimenters found this out, they thought they had made a revolutionary discovery – humans are not in fact hardwired to optimize self-gain, but are instead hardwired to be altruistic to other humans.

On the other hand, most people receiving money don’t actually accept all incoming offers. If the offer is extremely low, like $1 or $2, they will reject the offer, sacrificing what they could have gotten in order to show their disgust of how selfish the other individual is. This means that, again, instead of maximizing personal gain, people will freely give up money to make other people suffer for their socially unacceptable behavior. This suggests that people think other people are supposed to be altruistic to others.

This brings us back to the original thought process of the splitter. Is the splitter giving 40% or 50% of the money to the other participant because they are actually altruistic, or is it just because they don’t want their offer to be rejected?

And if people are really this altruistic, then why is there so much crime and theft?

Let me take you back to when I was a participant of the ultimatum game. The full experimental session took a total of eight hours. I happened to be really good at the puzzle games at the beginning of the session, and ended up finishing about an hour or so ahead of schedule. The researcher then told me the next task was the ultimatum game, and that I would be playing against a real human being. This immediately set off a red flag in my mind – I knew that the chances of someone else doing the same eight-hour experiment as me at the same time and finishing the same puzzle games as me at the same speed to be ahead of schedule the same amount was near-zero. I concluded that I wasn’t actually playing with a real human being, but most likely a computerized recording of a previous participant’s choices.

I was randomly selected as being the receiver. The whole game was three rounds long, each round involving $10. The first offer was split 80-20, with me receiving the 20%. I still had the slightest thought that this might really be a human, so I rejected the offer to let my partner know that I wanted more money than that. I waited for the next round to begin.

The next round had the same result – the second offer was split 80-20 again. At that point I had solidified my hypothesis that I was not playing against a real human, because unless my partner was autistic, they would’ve decreased their selfishness to make sure I wouldn’t reject the offer again. I realized it was pointless to try and condition my opponent to give me more money because a set of recorded offers wasn’t going to change, so I just accepted the offer to leave the experiment with as much money as possible. The third offer was even worse – a 90-10 split – but I accepted it anyway because there was no point rejecting the offer to make a computer feel bad.

This brings up a very important methodological flaw in the experiment process. Out of the participants of this experiment, how many of them felt as if they weren’t playing with a real human being, and how did that affect the level of altruism? I personally think that humans are really altruistic, but altruism is heavily dependent on how emotionally connected one feels with the other human he or she is dealing with. One additional control placed on how the ultimatum game is run can easily find out if this is true or not.

The additional control is set-up. There are three basic different possibilities for the set-up of the ultimatum game: participant playing with a computer, participant playing with another participant via a computer, and participant playing with another participant face-to-face.

As clearly seen by my experiment experience (and the experience of my mysterious partner, if those responses were in fact those of another human), if we think that we’re not playing against another human, our signs of altruism and expected altruism are neutralized and we play just to optimize our personal gains.

But what if we do really believe that we’re playing against another human? Does our level of altruism change if we’re playing with them through a computer versus face-to-face? I haven’t been able to find any specific research results for variations of the ultimatum game with that set-up control, but I do know of a very similar experiment that did have this set-up control: the Milgram experiment.

The Milgram experiment was originally created to prove that Germans were genetically predisposed to following the authority of Adolf Hitler during the Nazi revolution and that Americans would never do such a thing if such an opportunity came to America. The experimenter, Stanley Milgram, played the role of the teacher. Another experimenter played the role of the learner. The participant played the role of the shocker. The experiment involved the teacher asking the learner questions; if the learner got the question incorrect, the shocker would electrocute the learner. The twist was that the participant didn’t know that the learner was another experimenter, and instead thought the learner was another participant. The participant also did not know that the electric shocks were not real.

The results of this experiment were shocking (in a figurative sense) to Milgram – his hypothesis was wrong, and Americans were just as compliant to authority as Germans. Americans were just as likely as Germans to shock the learner with the maximum voltage, simply because the teacher said so and claimed it was okay. Once Milgram figured this out, he started making some alterations. The one we’ll be focusing on to connect with the ultimatum game is the alteration of the level of personal connection between the shocker and the learner.

When the experiment started, the shocker had different roles in setting up the experiment. Some would be sitting across a glass wall far away from the learner and would never make contact with him. Some would be instructed to go strap the shocking devices onto the body of the learner. Some would be given some time to chat with the learner. Overall, the more physical and personal contact the shocker had with the learner, the less severely the shocker would shock the learner, most likely because the learner was more easily able to put him or herself into the shoes of the learner.

My guess is that the same will apply to the ultimatum game. The more we increase the amount of personal contact with the other participant, the more willing we will be to split the money fairly and equally. This means that altruism between two people has a direct positive causational correlation with the level of personal connection between the two.

So back to the big question from a while back – if people are so altruistic, why is there so much crime? Based on the results from the Milgram experiment and the assumed results from a variation of the ultimatum game, crime and theft occurs because, although we’re altruistic, we don’t have something that reminds us of how altruistic we actually are. Once that personal connection is sparked, our altruism comes back and proves that the original finding of the ultimatum game – that we’re hardwired to help others – is actually true (even though the specific instance of altruism in the original ultimatum game might have been fueled by something different).