Social Distance and Other-Regarding Behavior in Dictator Games

In this chapter, we ask if instructional and procedural manipulation can be used in a systematic way to understand the social norms that have been said to be the cause of deviations from game theoretic predictions in dictator and other games. We find that such manipulations, intended to affect subjects' degree of social distance from the experimenter and assumed to affect expectations of reciprocity, play a key role in determining and understanding behavior.