Increasing the external validity of social preference games by reducing measurement error

• Authors: Daniel Navarro-Martínez.
• Games and Economic Behavior
• Behavioral and Experimental Economics

An increasing number of studies call into question the external validity of social preference games. In this paper, we show that these games have a low correlation with single pro-social behaviors in the field, but this correlation can be substantially increased by aggregating behaviors to reduce measurement error. We tracked people’s daily pro-social behaviors for 14 days using a day reconstruction method; the same people played three different social preference games on seven different occasions. We show that, as more pro-social behaviors and game rounds are aggregated, the games become much better predictors of pro-sociality. This predictive power is further increased by using statistical methods designed to better account for measurement error. These findings suggest that social preference games capture important underlying dispositions of real-world pro-sociality, and they can be successfully used to predict aggregated pro-social inclinations. This has crucial implications for the external validity and applicability of economic games.