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In social psychology and economics, the dictator game is a popular experimental instrument that is a derivative of the ultimatum game. It involves a single decision by the "dictator" player: given an amount of money, how much to keep and how much to send to another player. Although the "dictator" has the most power, the game has mixed results based on different behavioral attributes. The results – where most dictators choose to send money – evidence the role of fairness and norms in economic behavior, and undermine the assumption of narrow self-interest when given the opportunity to maximise one's own profits.
While the ultimatum game is informative, it can be considered an over simplified model when discussing most real-world negotiation situations. Real-world games tend to involve offers and counteroffers while the ultimatum game is simply player one placing forward a division of an amount that player 2 has to accept or reject. Based on this limited scope, it is expected that the second player will accept any offer they are given, which is not necessarily seen in real world examples.
In the original dictator game, the dictator and the recipient were randomly selected and completely unknown. However it was found that the result was different depending on the social distance between the two parties. The level of "social distance" that a dictator and a recipient have changes the ratio of endowment that the dictator is willing to give. If the dictator in the game has anonymity with the recipient, resulting in a high level of social distance, they are most likely to give less endowment, whereas players with a low level of social distance, whether they are very familiar with each other or shallowly acquainted, are more likely to give a higher proportion of the endowment to the recipient.
When players are within an organization, they are likely to have a low level of social distance. Within organizations, altruism and prosocial behavior are heavily relied on in dictator games for optimal organizational output. Prosocial behavior encourages the "intention of promoting the welfare of the individual, group, or organization toward which it is directed".Brief and Motowildo, 1986, p. 711
Experimental results have indicated that adults often allocate money to the recipients, reducing the amount of money the dictator receives.For an overview see (2025). 9781400840885, Princeton University Press. ISBN 9781400840885 These results appear robust: for example, Henrich et al. discovered in a wide cross-cultural study that dictators allocate a non-zero share of the endowment to the recipient. (2025). 9780199262045, Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780199262045 In modified versions of the dictator game, children also tend to allocate some of a resource to a recipient and most five-year-olds share at least half of their goods.
A number of studies have examined psychological framing of the dictator game with a version called "taking" in which the player "takes" resources from the recipient's predetermined endowment, rather than choosing the amount to "give". Some studies show no effect between male and female players, but one 2017 study reported a difference between male and female players in the taking frame, with females allocating significantly more to the recipient under the "taking" frame compared to the "giving" frame, while males showed exactly the opposite behavior – nullifying the overall effect.
In 2016, Bhogal et al. conducted a study to evaluate the effects of perceived attractiveness on decision-making behavior and altruism in the standard dictator game, testing theories that altruism may serve as a courtship display. This study found no relationship between attractiveness and altruism.
If these experiments appropriately reflect individuals' preferences outside of the laboratory, these results appear to demonstrate that either:
Additional experiments have shown that subjects maintain a high degree of consistency across multiple versions of the dictator game in which the cost of giving varies. This suggests that dictator game behavior is well approximated by a model in which dictators maximize utility functions that include benefits received by others, that is, subjects are increasing their utility when they pass money to the recipients. The latter implies they are maximizing a utility function that incorporates the recipient's welfare and not only their own welfare. This is the core of the "other-regarding" preferences. A number of experiments have shown that donations are substantially larger when the dictators are aware of the recipient's need of the money. Other experiments have shown a relationship between political participation, social integration, and dictator game giving, suggesting that it may be an externally valid indicator of concern for the well-being of others. Regarding altruism, recent papers have shown that experimental subjects in a lab environment do not behave differently to other participants in an outside setting. Studies have suggested that behavior in this game is heritable.
Additionally, the mixed results of the dictator game point to other behavioral attributes that may influence how individuals play the game. Specifically, people are motivated by altruism and how their actions are perceived by others, rather than solely by avoiding being viewed as greedy. There have been experiments that more deeply study people's motivations in this game. One experiment showed that females are more likely to value altruism in their actions than males. They are also more likely to be more altruistic towards other females than to males. This proves that there are many extraneous variables that may influence players' decisions in the dictator game, such as an individual's own motivations and the other players.
Betrayal aversion is another major factor that weighs the impact of trust and risk, determining whether trusting another person is equivalent to taking a risky bet.Bohnet, I.; Zeckhauser, R. (2004). "Trust, risk and betrayal". J. Econ. Behav. Organ. 55: 467–484. Initially coined by Bohnet and Zeckhauser, betrayal aversion could prevent the trustor from not trusting the trustee due to the social risk of having zero payoffs. Their study looked at a practical experiment where participants were randomly paired with one another to increase the probability that the outcome would be dependent on the actions of the trustee selected. Results from the study showed that regardless of whether the trustor placed a safe or risky bet, the payoffs were not equivalent to the trustee's payoffs. Ultimately, Bohnet and Zeckhauser assessed potential risk with the Trust Game and the relative hesitation made by each participant when deciding the amount to give in the game.
A variation of the dictator game called the "taking" game (see "Experiments" section above for further detail) emerged from sociological experiments conducted in 2003, in which the dictator decides how much utility to "take" from the recipient's pre-determined endowment. This dictator game variation was designed to evaluate the idea of greed, rather than the idea of fairness or altruism generally evaluated with the standard dictator game model, also referred to as the "giving" game.
Snir (2014) further explored these dynamics by allowing dictators to determine the probability of selecting each of three possible allocations of €12 between themselves and a recipient:
The findings indicate that, on average, dictators chose the selfish allocation (Option A) 70% of the time, regardless of whether the recipients were only aware of the outcomes or also knew the probabilities.
Similarly, Carpenter et al. (2005) observed that increasing the sum from $10 to $100 did not affect the relative share given by the dictator.
However, List and Cherry (2008) found that increasing the sum from $10 to $100 led to an increase in donations, but by less than the proportional increase in the total amount.
Engel (2011) conducted a meta-analysis and concluded that as the available sum increased, dictators tended to keep a larger proportion for themselves.
Expanding the dictator's range of choices also influenced behavior. List (2007) and Bardsley (2008) allowed dictators to not only give money but also take money from the recipient. This led to decreased generosity, although only a few participants opted for full selfishness. Nonetheless, some chose to take money from the recipient.
The results showed that public payments decreased the average level of giving.
Similarly, Charness and Gneezy (2008) compared a completely anonymous dictator game (where neither party knew each other's identity) to one where each dictator knew the recipient's last name. Removing full anonymity increased giving from 18.3% to 27.2%. Bechler et al. (2015) found that this effect persisted even when the available sum was increased.
Goeree et al. (2010) conducted a study mapping students' social networks in a California high school. He finds that the closer the social ties between the dictator and the recipient, the higher the level of giving.
Andreoni and Rao (2011) found that giving increased significantly when the recipient could directly ask the dictator for a donation. Engel's (2011) meta-analysis of 20,813 observations showed that familiarity increased giving by an average of 0.658 percentage points.
To control for the possibility that participants might give more out of shame in front of the experimenter, Hoffman et al. (1994) conducted an experiment where even the experimenter did not know who the dictator was and who the recipient was. In this setup, the number of participants choosing to keep all the money significantly increased. In a follow-up study (Hoffman et al., 1996), the researchers manipulated anonymity levels and found that giving decreased as anonymity increased.
Burnham (2003) found that showing participants a picture of the recipient did not affect the number of people who chose to give $0, but those who did give ended up donating more.
Rigdon et al. (2009) tested the impact of subtle visual cues by presenting two different images to participants:
Dictators exposed to the eye-like pattern gave more, with a particularly strong effect on male participants. This suggests that even minimal social cues can influence generosity.
Hoffman et al. (1994) assigned dictator roles based on performance in a test, and Cherry et al. (2002) linked the amount available for allocation to test performance. In both cases, dictators gave less when they felt they had earned their money.
Oxoby and Spraggon (2008) further found that when the recipient had to earn the sum available for distribution, dictators were more generous, sometimes even giving more than 50%. These results suggest that perceptions of fairness depend on whether wealth was acquired by luck or effort. When money is earned through personal effort, people feel less obligated to share it. However, if the money is obtained by chance, the expectation of fairness increases.
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