Social image or social Norm? Re-examining the audience effect in dictator game Experiments

Andreoni and Bernheim (2009) consider a variant of the dictator game in which a recipient does not know whether an allocation decision was made by a dictator or by an exogenous force, called “nature”. They find that as the likelihood of nature's intervention increased, more subjects mimicked the nature's move. We replicate their experiment, and examine a new treatment in which a recipient is always informed about whether a dictator or nature made a decision. We find that (i) many dictators’ decisions were affected by nature's intervention even when the recipient was informed of whether the dictator or nature had made the decision, which suggests that the intervention altered not only the incentive to signal one's willingness to comply with the social norm but also the social norm itself (i.e., the perception of an appropriate action), but (ii) still dictators’ behavior under the two treatments differed significantly, which suggests that the audience effect also matters greatly.