I first got attracted by this book thanks to its beautiful cover (in a Seattle bookstore last year)! The book is an aggregate of three stories, loosely related around the themes of altruism and disastrous good intentions. I did not like the first story, about the disintegration of a gay couple by ways of (OCD) psychiatric issues as well as an increasing radicalism towards Ayush’s societal choices, with some shocking episodes as when he shows illegal filming from pig abattoirs to their young children. I saw some worth in the second story, when a classic academic gets obsessed with the migration of a Sudanese child-soldier to the point of obsession, removing herself from her job and civic duties, as in not reporting a possible hit & run, and eventually gifting a kidney to the refugee’s brother. As a dubious reparation for her grand-parents’ involvement in the British Raj colonialism. I mostly enjoyed the third one, where Sabita, a rural Bengali or Bangladeshi woman, receives a cow from experimental economists (in the spirit of Esther Duflo’s school), a stupendous gift that is slowly unraveling her family and her precarious finances. However, my overall impression is one of an overly ideological posture, tending to caricatures (esp. of academics) and compartmentalisation of individuals, to the detriment of the book per se and to the depth of its characters. The last story is further strongly condescending towards the main character who proves unable to manage the cow (and her family), again forcing the trait for the sake of the political argument. The Guardian is more appreciative of the book, however.
Archive for experimental economics
measuring honesty, with p=.006…
Posted in Books, Kids, pictures, Statistics with tags behavioural economics, empirical cdf, experimental economics, honesty, Nature, psychology on April 19, 2016 by xi'an
Simon Gächter and Jonathan Schulz recently published a paper in Nature attempting to link intrinsic (individual) honesty with a measure of corruption in the subject home country. Out of more than 2,500 subjects in 23 countries. [I am now reading Nature on a regular basis, thanks to our lab subscribing a coffee room subscription!] Now I may sound naïvely surprised at the methodological contents of the paper and at a publication in Nature but I never read psychology papers, only Andrew’s rants at’em!!!
“The results are consistent with theories of the cultural co-evolution of institutions and values, and show that weak institutions and cultural legacies that generate rule violations not only have direct adverse economic consequences, but might also impair individual intrinsic honesty that is crucial for the smooth functioning of society.”
The experiment behind this article and its rather deep claims is however quite modest: the authors asked people to throw a dice twice without monitoring and rewarded them according to the reported result of the first throw. Being dishonest here means reporting a false result towards a larger monetary gain. This sounds rather artificial and difficult to relate to dishonest behaviours in realistic situations, as I do not see much appeal in cheating for 50 cents or so. Especially since the experiment accounted for a difference in wealth backgrounds, by adapting to the hourly wage in the country (“from $0.7 dollar in Vietnam to $4.2 in the Netherlands“). Furthermore, the subjects of this experiment were undergraduate students in economics departments: depending on the country, this may create a huge bias in terms of social background, as I do not think access to universities is the same in Germany and in Guatemala, say.
“Our expanded scope of societies therefore provides important support and qualifications for the generalizability of these theories—people benchmark their justifiable dishonesty with the extent of dishonesty they see in their societal environment.”
The statistical analysis behind this “important support” is not earth-shattering either. The main argument is based on the empirical cdfs of the gain repartitions per country (in the above graph), with tests that the overall empirical cdf for low corruption countries is higher than the corresponding one for high corruption countries. The comparison of the cumulated or pooled cdf across countries from each group is disputable, in that there is no reason the different countries have the same “honesty” cdf. The groups themselves are built on a rough measure of “prevalence of rule violations”. It is also rather surprising that for both groups the percentage of zero gain answers is “significantly” larger than the expected value of 2.8% if the assumption of “justified dishonesty” holds. In any case, there is no compelling argument as to why students not reporting the value of the first dice would naturally opt for the maximum of the two dices. Hence a certain bemusement at this paper appearing in Nature and even deserving an introductory coverage in the first part of the journal…
