Studying in situ behavior in a restaurant experience that is actually a social science laboratory

summary

A restaurant experience was created for the purpose of studying changes in generosity in 60 individuals over a series of three events. Factors that increase generosity were studied by comparing donations given with allocated legal tender after participating in a collaborative or a traditional dinner experience. Curious? read this piece in the New Modality.

Rationale & context

Numerous experimental societies are premised on being of service or participation. If we find that being gifted experiences leads to more prosocial behavior, we can build that into our social interactions, whereas if cooperation leads to leads to more prosocial behavior, we should model institutions with this in mind. More nuanced perhaps, is that one of these experiential interventions leads to a greater shift in generosity, but perhaps less overall generosity.

The current study aimed to test this in a naturalistic social setting. In order to test this, a social experience was designed that as close as possible mirrored the experience of a dinner party. Fifty guests were invited to an event called The Experimental Dinner – which was a small restaurant set up. Guests were informed that they would have a dinner experience but the dinner would also be part of a social science experiment, in which they would be randomly assigned to one of two dinner settings. They were not told any more before arriving.

generosity experiment

Much work has been done on factors that correlate with generosity. Here we wanted to start investigating factors that increase generosity. We investigated whether a collaborative or a traditional dinner experience led to the greatest shift in generosity, as measured by financial donation to a generic unspecific ‘good cause’. Our working hypothesis was that the collaborative experience would lead to the greatest shift in generosity. However, we noted that the reverse was also possible, given that participants in the traditional dinner experience might feel like they were given something and now should give in return. The aims of this experiment were:

  1. i)  To demonstrate that prosocial behaviors such as generosity can be studied in the wild and to develop a social platform for this.

  2. ii)  To demonstrate that prosocial behaviors such as generosity can be shifted in real behavior with genuine social interactions and phenomena such as legal tender.

Experimental set up

Over three experimental settings, 24 participants underwent the traditional dinner experience, and 26 participants underwent the collaborative dinner intervention.

Learnings & Findings

The aim of this experiment was to design and pilot a protocol where it would be possible to create naturalistic social situations, in which we can study social dynamics. We have shown that this is possible - these social experiments were popular and the spots were easily filled. Participants were enthusiastic about the experience, which is in stark contrast to laboratory and online experiments. We secondly wanted to test if it is possible to study prosocial behaviors in situ, with real life features. We have shown not only that it is possible to study such things, but also that it is possible to alter generosity.

Here we report that participants in the collaborative group became less generous with experimental money, compared to the traditional dinner group, but gave more of their own money (as opposed to allocated experimental legal tender). These data suggest potentially dissociable effects in giving with someone else’s money compared with giving with one’s own money.

read the paper here

You can view & download the full write up here. If you are interested in writing a review of this, please reach out.

 

changes in generosity

Of the participants that showed a change in generosity pre- and post intervention, more people shifted generosity following the collaborative intervention compared to the traditional restaurant intervention, in both directions (Figure 2a). Of the participants that showed altered generosity post intervention, again there was a larger range in the degree of generosity shift following the collaborative dinner compared to the traditional dinner, but in both cases there was subjects who displayed a positive and a negative shift in generosity (Figure 2b). An unexpected finding was that some participants went out of their way to donate their own money. More participants from the collaborative experience engaged in this form of “true donations” (generosity ++), and this group gave more in total (Figure 2c).