RT Journal Article
T1 Playing with words: do people exploit loaded language to affect others' decisions for their own benefit?
A1 Capraro, Valerio
A1 Vanzo, Andrea
A1 Cabrales Goitia, Antonio
AB We report on three pre-registered studies testing whether people in the position of describing a decision problem to decision-makers exploit this opportunity for their benefit, by choosing descriptions that may be potentially beneficial for themselves. In Study 1, recipients of an extreme dictator game (where dictators can either take the whole pie for themselves or give it entirely to the receiver) are asked to choose the instructions used to introduce the game to dictators, from six different instructions known from previous research to affect dictators" decisions. The results demonstrate that some dictator game recipients tend to choose instructions that make them more likely to receive a higher payoff. Study 2 shows that people who choose descriptions that make them more likely to receive a higher payoff indeed believe that they will receive a higher payoff. Study 3 shows that receivers are more likely than dictators to choose these self-serving descriptions. In sum, our work suggests that some people choose descriptions that are beneficial to themselves; we also found some evidence that deliberative thinking and young age are associated with this tendency
PB Cambridge University Press
SN 1930-2975
YR 2023
FD 2023-01-01
LK https://hdl.handle.net/10016/38558
UL https://hdl.handle.net/10016/38558
LA eng
NO Financial support by Comunidad de Madrid, under grants EPUC3M11 (V PRICIT) and H2019/HUM-589, is gratefully acknowledged
DS e-Archivo
RD 17 jul. 2024