Competition and moral behavior: A meta-analysis of forty-five crowd-sourced experimental designs

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cris.lastimport.scopus2025-04-18T03:14:32Z
dc.abstract.enDoes competition affect moral behavior? This fundamental question has been debated among leading scholars for centuries, and more recently, it has been tested in experimental studies yielding a body of rather inconclusive empirical evidence. A potential source of ambivalent empirical results on the same hypothesis is design heterogeneity—variation in true effect sizes across various reasonable experimental research protocols. To provide further evidence on whether competition affects moral behavior and to examine whether the generalizability of a single experimental study is jeopardized by design heterogeneity, we invited independent research teams to contribute experimental designs to a crowd-sourced project. In a large-scale online data collection, 18,123 experimental participants were randomly allocated to 45 randomly selected experimental designs out of 95 submitted designs. We find a small adverse effect of competition on moral behavior in a meta-analysis of the pooled data. The crowd-sourced design of our study allows for a clean identification and estimation of the variation in effect sizes above and beyond what could be expected due to sampling variance. We find substantial design heterogeneity—estimated to be about 1.6 times as large as the average standard error of effect size estimates of the 45 research designs—indicating that the informativeness and generalizability of results based on a single experimental design are limited. Drawing strong conclusions about the underlying hypotheses in the presence of substantive design heterogeneity requires moving toward much larger data collections on various experimental designs testing the same hypothesis.
dc.affiliationInstytut Psychologii
dc.affiliationWydział Psychologii we Wrocławiu
dc.contributor.authorHuber, Christoph
dc.contributor.authorDreber, Anna
dc.contributor.authorHuber, Jürgen
dc.contributor.authorJohannesson, Magnus
dc.contributor.authorKirchler, Michael
dc.contributor.authorWeitzel, Utz
dc.contributor.authorAbellán, Miguel
dc.contributor.authorAdayeva, Xeniya
dc.contributor.authorAy, Fehime Ceren
dc.contributor.authorBarron, Kai
dc.contributor.authorBerry, Zachariah
dc.contributor.authorBönte, Werner
dc.contributor.authorBrütt, Katharina
dc.contributor.authorBulutay, Muhammed
dc.contributor.authorCampos-Mercade, Pol
dc.contributor.authorCardella, Eric
dc.contributor.authorClaassen, Maria Almudena
dc.contributor.authorCornelissen, Gert
dc.contributor.authorDawson, Ian G. J.
dc.contributor.authorDelnoij, Joyce
dc.contributor.authorDemiral, Elif E.
dc.contributor.authorDimant, Eugen
dc.contributor.authorDoerflinger, Johannes Theodor
dc.contributor.authorDold, Malte
dc.contributor.authorEmery, Cécile
dc.contributor.authorFiala, Lenka
dc.contributor.authorFiedler, Susann
dc.contributor.authorFreddi, Eleonora
dc.contributor.authorFries, Tilman
dc.contributor.authorGąsiorowska, Agata
dc.contributor.authorGlogowsky, Ulrich
dc.contributor.authorM. Gorny, Paul M.
dc.contributor.authorGretton, Jeremy David
dc.contributor.authorGrohmann, Antonia
dc.contributor.authorHafenbrädl, Sebastian
dc.contributor.authorHandgraaf, Michel
dc.contributor.authorHanoch, Yaniv
dc.contributor.authorHart, Einav
dc.contributor.authorHennig, Max
dc.contributor.authorHudja, Stanton
dc.contributor.authorHütter, Mandy
dc.contributor.authorHyndman, Kyle
dc.contributor.authorIoannidis, Konstantinos
dc.contributor.authorIsler, Ozan
dc.contributor.authorJeworrek, Sabrina
dc.contributor.authorJolles, Daniel
dc.contributor.authorJuanchich, Marie
dc.contributor.authorPratap KC, Raghabendra
dc.contributor.authorKhadjavi, Menusch
dc.contributor.authorKugler, Tamar
dc.contributor.authorLi, Shuwen
dc.contributor.authorLucas, Brian
dc.contributor.authorMak, Vincent
dc.contributor.authorMechtel, Mario
dc.contributor.authorMerkle, Christoph
dc.contributor.authorMeyers, Ethan Andrew
dc.contributor.authorMollerstrom, Johanna
dc.contributor.authorNesterov, Alexander
dc.contributor.authorNeyse, Levent
dc.contributor.authorNieken, Petra
dc.contributor.authorNussberger, Anne-Marie
dc.contributor.authorPalumbo, Helena
dc.contributor.authorPeters, Kim
dc.contributor.authorPirrone, Angelo
dc.contributor.authorQin, Xiangdong
dc.contributor.authorRahal, Rima Maria
dc.contributor.authorRau, Holger
dc.contributor.authorRincke, Johannes
dc.contributor.authorRonzani, Piero
dc.contributor.authorRoth, Yefim
dc.contributor.authorSeyhun Saral, Ali
dc.contributor.authorSchmitz, Jan
dc.contributor.authorSchneider, Florian
dc.contributor.authorSchram, Arthur
dc.contributor.authorSchudy, Simeon
dc.contributor.authorSchweitzer, Maurice E.
dc.contributor.authorSchwieren, Christiane
dc.contributor.authorScopelliti, Irene
dc.contributor.authorSirota, Miroslav
dc.contributor.authorSonnemans, Joep
dc.contributor.authorSoraperra, Ivan
dc.contributor.authorSpantig, Lisa
dc.contributor.authorSteimanis, Ivo
dc.contributor.authorSteinmetz, Janina
dc.contributor.authorSuetens, Sigrid
dc.contributor.authorTheodoropoulou, Andriana
dc.contributor.authorUrbig, Diemo
dc.contributor.authorVorlaufer, Tobias
dc.contributor.authorWaibel, Joschka
dc.contributor.authorWoods, Daniel
dc.contributor.authorYakobi, Ofir
dc.contributor.authorYilmaz, Onurcan
dc.contributor.authorZaleśkiewicz, Tomasz
dc.contributor.authorZeisberger, Stefan
dc.contributor.authorHolzmeister, Felix
dc.date.access2023-05-30
dc.date.accessioned2024-01-08T08:40:03Z
dc.date.available2024-01-08T08:40:03Z
dc.date.created2023-04-05
dc.date.issued2023-05-30
dc.description.abstract<jats:p>Does competition affect moral behavior? This fundamental question has been debated among leading scholars for centuries, and more recently, it has been tested in experimental studies yielding a body of rather inconclusive empirical evidence. A potential source of ambivalent empirical results on the same hypothesis is design heterogeneity—variation in true effect sizes across various reasonable experimental research protocols. To provide further evidence on whether competition affects moral behavior and to examine whether the generalizability of a single experimental study is jeopardized by design heterogeneity, we invited independent research teams to contribute experimental designs to a crowd-sourced project. In a large-scale online data collection, 18,123 experimental participants were randomly allocated to 45 randomly selected experimental designs out of 95 submitted designs. We find a small adverse effect of competition on moral behavior in a meta-analysis of the pooled data. The crowd-sourced design of our study allows for a clean identification and estimation of the variation in effect sizes above and beyond what could be expected due to sampling variance. We find substantial design heterogeneity—estimated to be about 1.6 times as large as the average standard error of effect size estimates of the 45 research designs—indicating that the informativeness and generalizability of results based on a single experimental design are limited. Drawing strong conclusions about the underlying hypotheses in the presence of substantive design heterogeneity requires moving toward much larger data collections on various experimental designs testing the same hypothesis.</jats:p>
dc.description.accesstimeat_publication
dc.description.issue23
dc.description.physical1-10
dc.description.versionfinal_published
dc.description.volume120
dc.identifier.doi10.1073/pnas.2215572120
dc.identifier.eissn1091-6490
dc.identifier.issn0027-8424
dc.identifier.urihttps://share.swps.edu.pl/handle/swps/302
dc.identifier.weblinkhttps://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2215572120
dc.languageen
dc.pbn.affiliationpsychologia
dc.rightsCC-BY-NC-ND
dc.rights.explanationNie dostarczono wersji AAM
dc.rights.questionYes_rights
dc.share.articleOTHER
dc.subject.encompetition
dc.subject.enmoral behavior
dc.subject.enmetascience
dc.subject.engeneralizability
dc.subject.enexperimental design
dc.swps.sciencecloudnosend
dc.titleCompetition and moral behavior: A meta-analysis of forty-five crowd-sourced experimental designs
dc.title.journalProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
dc.typeJournalArticle
dspace.entity.typeArticle