Learning to be selfish? A large-scale longitudinal analysis of Dictator games played on Amazon Mechanical Turk

Mapping Intimacies ◽

10.31234/osf.io/87e4y ◽

2019 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Antonio Alonso Arechar ◽

David Gertler Rand

Keyword(s):

Longitudinal Analysis ◽

Large Scale ◽

Dictator Game ◽

Mechanical Turk ◽

Amazon Mechanical Turk ◽

Social Setting ◽

Negative Effects ◽

Dictator Games

We investigate whether experience playing the Dictator Game (DG) affects prosociality by aggregating data from 37 experiments run on Amazon Mechanical Turk over a six-year period. While prior evidence has shown a correlation between experience on Amazon Mechanical Turk and selfishness, it is unclear to what extent this is the result of selection versus learning. Examining a total of 27,266 decisions made by 17,791 unique individuals, our data shows evidence of significant negative effects of both selection and learning. First, people who participated in a greater total number of our experiments were more selfish, even in their first game – indicating that people who are more likely to select into our experiments are more selfish. Second, a given individual tends to transfer less money over successive experiments – indicating that experience with the DG leads to greater selfishness. These results provide clear evidence of learning even in this non-strategic social setting.

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A positive effect of flowers rather than eye images in a large-scale, cross-cultural dictator game

Proceedings of The Royal Society B Biological Sciences ◽

10.1098/rspb.2012.0758 ◽

2012 ◽

Vol 279 (1742) ◽

pp. 3556-3564 ◽

Cited By ~ 42

Author(s):

Nichola J. Raihani ◽

Redouan Bshary

Keyword(s):

Labour Market ◽

Large Scale ◽

Dictator Game ◽

Social Cues ◽

Cross Cultural ◽

Systematic Variation ◽

Mechanical Turk ◽

Amazon Mechanical Turk ◽

Cooperative Behaviour ◽

Positive Effect

People often consider how their behaviour will be viewed by others, and may cooperate to avoid gaining a bad reputation. Sensitivity to reputation may be elicited by subtle social cues of being watched: previous studies have shown that people behave more cooperatively when they see images of eyes rather than control images. Here, we tested whether eye images enhance cooperation in a dictator game, using the online labour market Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT). In contrast to our predictions and the results of most previous studies, dictators gave away more money when they saw images of flowers rather than eye images. Donations in response to eye images were not significantly different to donations under control treatments. Dictator donations varied significantly across cultures but there was no systematic variation in responses to different image types across cultures. Unlike most previous studies, players interacting via AMT may feel truly anonymous when making decisions and, as such, may not respond to subtle social cues of being watched. Nevertheless, dictators gave away similar amounts as in previous studies, so anonymity did not erase helpfulness. We suggest that eye images might only promote cooperative behaviour in relatively public settings and that people may ignore these cues when they know their behaviour is truly anonymous.

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Testing the Waters: Behavior across Participant Pools

The American Economic Review ◽

10.1257/aer.20181065 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 111 (2) ◽

pp. 687-719

Author(s):

Erik Snowberg ◽

Leeat Yariv

Keyword(s):

External Validity ◽

Large Scale ◽

Student Population ◽

University Student ◽

Mechanical Turk ◽

Amazon Mechanical Turk ◽

Lab Experiments ◽

The Us ◽

Small Set ◽

Observer Effects

We leverage a large-scale incentivized survey eliciting behaviors from (almost) an entire undergraduate university student population, a representative sample of the US population, and Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) to address concerns about the external validity of experiments with student participants. Behavior in the student population offers bounds on behaviors in other populations, and correlations between behaviors are similar across samples. Furthermore, non-student samples exhibit higher levels of noise. Adding historical lab participation data, we find a small set of attributes over which lab participants differ from non-lab participants. An additional set of lab experiments shows no evidence of observer effects. (JEL C83, D90, D91)

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Turkers of the World Unite: Multilevel In-Group Bias Among Crowdworkers on Amazon Mechanical Turk

Social Psychological and Personality Science ◽

10.1177/1948550619837002 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 11 (2) ◽

pp. 151-159 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Abdullah Almaatouq ◽

Peter Krafft ◽

Yarrow Dunham ◽

David G. Rand ◽

Alex Pentland

Keyword(s):

Group Treatment ◽

Dictator Game ◽

Social Contexts ◽

Black Box ◽

Mechanical Turk ◽

Amazon Mechanical Turk ◽

Economic Games ◽

The World ◽

Good Proxy ◽

Indispensable Tool

Crowdsourcing has become an indispensable tool in the behavioral sciences. Often, the “crowd” is considered a black box for gathering impersonal but generalizable data. Researchers sometimes seem to forget that crowdworkers are people with social contexts, unique personalities, and lives. To test this possibility, we measure how crowdworkers ( N = 2,337, preregistered) share a monetary endowment in a Dictator Game with another Mechanical Turk (MTurk) worker, a worker from another crowdworking platform, or a randomly selected stranger. Results indicate preferential in-group treatment for MTurk workers in particular and for crowdworkers in general. Cooperation levels from typical anonymous economic games on MTurk are not a good proxy for anonymous interactions and may generalize most readily only to the intragroup context.

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The Language Demographics of Amazon Mechanical Turk

Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics ◽

10.1162/tacl_a_00167 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 2 ◽

pp. 79-92 ◽

Cited By ~ 19

Author(s):

Ellie Pavlick ◽

Matt Post ◽

Ann Irvine ◽

Dmitry Kachaev ◽

Chris Callison-Burch

Keyword(s):

Large Scale ◽

Language Skills ◽

Statistical Machine Translation ◽

Mechanical Turk ◽

Amazon Mechanical Turk ◽

Indian Languages ◽

Parallel Corpora ◽

Bilingual Dictionaries ◽

Bilingual Speakers ◽

Translation Systems

We present a large scale study of the languages spoken by bilingual workers on Mechanical Turk (MTurk). We establish a methodology for determining the language skills of anonymous crowd workers that is more robust than simple surveying. We validate workers’ self-reported language skill claims by measuring their ability to correctly translate words, and by geolocating workers to see if they reside in countries where the languages are likely to be spoken. Rather than posting a one-off survey, we posted paid tasks consisting of 1,000 assignments to translate a total of 10,000 words in each of 100 languages. Our study ran for several months, and was highly visible on the MTurk crowdsourcing platform, increasing the chances that bilingual workers would complete it. Our study was useful both to create bilingual dictionaries and to act as census of the bilingual speakers on MTurk. We use this data to recommend languages with the largest speaker populations as good candidates for other researchers who want to develop crowdsourced, multilingual technologies. To further demonstrate the value of creating data via crowdsourcing, we hire workers to create bilingual parallel corpora in six Indian languages, and use them to train statistical machine translation systems.

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СОЦИАЛЬНО-ЭКОНОМИЧЕСКИЕ КОНФЛИКТЫ В РАМКАХ «КАПИТАЛИЗМА ПЛАТФОРМ»

Konfliktologia ◽

10.31312/2310-6085-2019-14-3-33-43 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 14 (3) ◽

pp. 33

Author(s):

L. V. Tomin

Keyword(s):

Large Scale ◽

Network Effects ◽

Corporate Control ◽

Balance Of Power ◽

Negative Effects ◽

Potential Threat ◽

Communication Infrastructure ◽

Political Effects ◽

Information And Communication ◽

Integrated Information

The article is devoted to the analysis of the structure, the peculiarities of functioning and the socio-economic and political effects of the «platform capitalism». The basis of this model is the network effects produced by the integrated information and communication infrastructure, which contribute to the monopolization and the constant expansion of platform companies into new areas. The principle of functioning of this infrastructure is the continuous collection and further monetization of data extracted from the interactions of individuals among themselves or with one of the elements of a digitalized economy or government structures. Such an infrastructure — forms a potential threat of strengthening state and corporate control over citizens. In addition, the activities of platform companies produce negative effects on the labor market, reinforcing the process of precarization of employment. The integrated information and communication infrastructure of platform companies form a system of a kind of «digital Taylorism», which deprives the employee of autonomy and privacy in the workplace. The influence of digitalization, subjected to the technocratic logic of the neoliberal model of governance in democratic countries, strengthens the de-politicization of relations between the citizen and the state and further changes the balance of power between labor and capital in favor of the latter. Large-scale protests of the last years against the companies of “capitalism of platforms” demonstrated the structural contradictions of this model and formed new forms of organization and actions of grassroots workers of the “digital economy”.

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Towards Control of an Estuary

Water Science & Technology ◽

10.2166/wst.1987.0077 ◽

1987 ◽

Vol 19 (9) ◽

pp. 155-174

Author(s):

Henk L. F. Saeijs

Keyword(s):

Shallow Water ◽

Storm Surge ◽

Salt Marshes ◽

Large Scale ◽

Western Europe ◽

Oxygen Depletion ◽

Negative Effects ◽

Intertidal Flats ◽

Environmental Consequences ◽

Short Time

The Delta Project is in its final stage. In 1974 it was subjected to political reconsideration, but it is scheduled now for completion in 1987. The final touches are being put to the storm-surge barrier and two compartment dams that divide the Oosterschelde into three areas: one tidal, one with reduced tide, and one a freshwater lake. Compartmentalization will result in 13% of channels, 45% of intertidal flats and 59% of salt marshes being lost. There is a net gain of 7% of shallow-water areas. Human interventions with large scale impacts are not new in the Oosterschelde but the large scale and short time in which these interventions are taking place are, as is the creation of a controlled tidal system. This article focusses on the area with reduced tide and compares resent day and expected characteristics. In this reduced tidal part salt marshes will extend by 30–70%; intertidal flats will erode to a lower level and at their edges, and the area of shallow water will increase by 47%. Biomass production on the intertidal flats will decrease, with consequences for crustaceans, fishes and birds. The maximum number of waders counted on one day and the number of ‘bird-days' will decrease drastically, with negative effects for the wader populations of western Europe. The net area with a hard substratum in the reduced tidal part has more than doubled. Channels will become shallower. Detritus import will not change significantly. Stratification and oxygen depletion will be rare and local. The operation of the storm-surge barrier and the closure strategy chosen are very important for the ecosystem. Two optional closure strategies can be followed without any additional environmental consequences. It was essential to determine a clearly defined plan of action for the whole area, and to make land-use choices from the outset. How this was done is briefly described.

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Strategic deployment of riparian buffers and windbreaks in Europe can co-deliver biomass and environmental benefits

Communications Earth & Environment ◽

10.1038/s43247-021-00247-y ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 2 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Oskar Englund ◽

Pål Börjesson ◽

Blas Mola-Yudego ◽

Göran Berndes ◽

Ioannis Dimitriou ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Agricultural Production ◽

Large Scale ◽

Production Systems ◽

Riparian Buffers ◽

Environmental Benefits ◽

The European Union ◽

Negative Effects ◽

Nitrogen Emissions ◽

Environmental Objectives ◽

Eu Policies

AbstractWithin the scope of the new Common Agricultural Policy of the European Union, in coherence with other EU policies, new incentives are developed for farmers to deploy practices that are beneficial for climate, water, soil, air, and biodiversity. Such practices include establishment of multifunctional biomass production systems, designed to reduce environmental impacts while providing biomass for food, feed, bioenergy, and other biobased products. Here, we model three scenarios of large-scale deployment for two such systems, riparian buffers and windbreaks, across over 81,000 landscapes in Europe, and quantify the corresponding areas, biomass output, and environmental benefits. The results show that these systems can effectively reduce nitrogen emissions to water and soil loss by wind erosion, while simultaneously providing substantial environmental co-benefits, having limited negative effects on current agricultural production. This kind of beneficial land-use change using strategic perennialization is important for meeting environmental objectives while advancing towards a sustainable bioeconomy.

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EPCO-29. EPIGENOMICS OF THE GLIOMA LONGITUDINAL ANALYSIS (GLASS) CONSORTIUM

Neuro-Oncology ◽

10.1093/neuonc/noaa215.308 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 22 (Supplement_2) ◽

pp. ii75-ii75

Author(s):

Thais Sabedot ◽

Michael Wells ◽

Indrani Datta ◽

Tathiane Malta ◽

Ana Valeria Castro ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Dna Methylation ◽

Longitudinal Analysis ◽

Copy Number ◽

Large Scale ◽

Molecular Classification ◽

Tumor Burden ◽

Copy Number Alterations ◽

Unsupervised Analysis ◽

Diffuse Gliomas ◽

New Biomarkers

Abstract Adult diffuse gliomas are central nervous system (CNS) tumors that arise from the malignant transformation of glial cells. Nearly all gliomas will recur despite standard treatment however, current histopathological grading fails to predict which of them will relapse and/or progress. The Glioma Longitudinal AnalySiS (GLASS) consortium is a large-scale collaboration that aims to investigate the molecular profiling of matched primary and recurrent glioma samples from multiple institutions in order to better understand the dynamic evolution of these tumors. At this time, the cohort comprises 946 samples across 11 institutions and among those, 864 have DNA methylation data available. The current molecular classification based on 7 subtypes published by TCGA in 2016 was applied to the dataset. Among the IDH wildtype tumors, 33% (16/49) of the patients showed a change of subtype upon recurrence, whereas most of them (9/16) were Classic-like at the primary stage but changed to either Mesenchymal-like or PA-like at the recurrent level. Among the IDH mutant tumors, 15% (22/142) showed a change of subtype at recurrent stage, in which 16 out of 22 progressed from G-CIMP-high to G-CIMP-low. Although some tumors progressed to a different subtype upon recurrence, an unsupervised analysis showed that the samples tend to cluster by patient instead of by subtype. By estimating the copy number alterations of these tumors using DNA methylation, the overall copy number profile of the recurrent samples remains similar to their primary counterpart. From this initial analysis using epigenomic data, we were able to characterize some aspects of glioma evolution and how the DNA methylation is associated with the progression of these tumors to different subtypes. These findings corroborate the importance of epigenetics in gliomas and can potentially lead to the identification of new biomarkers that can reflect tumor burden and predict its development.

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