Dictator game giving: Rules of fairness versus acts of kindness

In both dictator and impunity games, one player, the dictator, divides a ®xed amount of money between himself and one other, the recipient. Recent lab studies of these games have produced seemingly inconsistent results, reporting substantially divergent amounts of dictator giving. Also, one prominent explanation for some of these di ̈erences, the impact of experimenter observation, displayed weak explanatory power in a di ̈erent but related lab game. Data from the new experiment reported here o ̈ers some explanations. We ®nd that dictators determine how much they will give on the basis of the total money available for the entire experimental session, not on the basis of what is available per game. This explains the reported di ̈erences between impunity and dictator studies. When distributing a gift among several recipients, individual dictators show little tendency towards equal treatment. Also, we ®nd no evidence for the experimenter observation e ̈ect. Comparison with earlier experiments suggests that di ̈erences in the context of the game, a ̈ected by di ̈erences in written directions and independent of experimenter observation, account for di ̈erences across dictator studies. We propose a hypothetical decision procedure, based on the notion that dictator giving originates with personal and social rules that e ̈ectively constrain self-interested behavior. The procedure provides a link between dictator behavior and a broader class of laboratory phenomena.