Dictator Game

The dictator game is a simple experimental game in which one player (the dictator) decides how to divide a fixed endowment between themselves and a passive recipient, who has no power to reject the offer. Unlike the ultimatum game, where rejection eliminates both players' payoffs, the dictator game removes all strategic reciprocity — the recipient cannot punish, reward, or influence the dictator in any way. Whatever the dictator chooses is final.

This design makes the dictator game the purest measure of altruism, fairness, or social preferences uncontaminated by strategic incentives. Yet dictators routinely give away 20-30% of the endowment, and significant minorities give 50%. These results are robust across cultures, stake sizes, and framing conditions. The standard interpretation is that humans have internalized fairness norms so deeply that they act on them even when no external enforcement mechanism exists.

But the dictator game also reveals the fragility of these norms. When the allocation decision is framed as 'earning' rather than 'dividing,' or when the dictator's identity is anonymized, giving drops sharply. Small changes in context — a word here, a visual cue there — produce large changes in behavior. This suggests that what the dictator game measures is not a stable preference but a contingent norm, activated by situational cues that signal whether the interaction falls within the domain of 'fairness' or 'self-interest.'