“Increasing the External Validity of Social Preference Games by Reducing Measurement Error”, 2023-09 ():
An increasing number of studies call into question the external validity of social preference games. In this paper, we show that these games have a low correlation with single pro-social behaviors in the field, but this correlation can be substantially increased by aggregating behaviors to reduce measurement error.
We tracked people’s daily pro-social behaviors for 14 days using a day reconstruction method; the same people played 3 different social preference games on 7 different occasions.
We show that, as more pro-social behaviors and game rounds are aggregated, the games become much better predictors of pro-sociality. This predictive power is further increased by using statistical methods [latent variables] designed to better account for measurement error.
These findings suggest that social preference games capture important underlying dispositions of real-world pro-sociality, and they can be successfully used to predict aggregated pro-social inclinations. This has crucial implications for the external validity and applicability of economic games.
[Keywords: social preference games, external validity, field behavior, measurement error, aggregation, day reconstruction method]