Robin Hood Victorious

A colleague sent around an article about research out of UCD that has gotten a lot of attention with headlines like: “Study Reveals “Robin Hood Impulse’ in Human Nature.”

…120 paid student volunteers at a computer lab on the campus of the University of California at Davis sat at computer terminals, and a computer would assign them into groups of four. Each person was assigned an amount of money and was told how much money the other three members were given. The players then had the chance to spend some of their own money in order to increase or decrease the amount the others possessed, but their actions provided no financial gain for themselves. According to the researchers, about 70% of participants at some point reduced or added to another person’s money, most often by taking from the richest players or by donating to the poorest players.

Not to be a total cynic, what do you think is the possibility that what researchers interpreted as egalitarianism is really a manifestation of competition, i.e. the money has been designated by the researchers as the “target” of the project and thjus imbued it with additional meaning. (And their sample is from UCD, one of the UC system’s competitive campuses.) One way of winning is to decrease the money of other players and doing so has no social ramifications because it’s not real money that people are using to pay rent (and they don’t have to feel guilty since they never meet the same players twice). It reminds me of Final Jeopardy where the trick is to bet enough so that you win as much as possible but if you lose you still have more than the next guy.

I think the researchers may be making a rather large interpretive leap from their findings, but Robin Hood is a great metaphor and it does indeed make a happier story out of their study. This could be interesting outcome data to compare to research findings on people’s behaviors in virtual environments where they have a degree of anonymity (chat rooms, avatars, etc.), but it appears that in this study, the participants were aware of their group members.