Radical framing effects in the ultimatum game: the impact of explicit culturally transmitted frames on economic decision-making
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Many studies have documented framing effects in economic games. These studies, however, have tended to use minimal framing cues (e.g. a single sentence labelling the frame), and the frames did not involve unambiguous offer expectations. Results often did not differ substantially from those in the unframed games. Here we test the hypothesis that, in contrast to the modal offer in the unframed ultimatum game (UG) (e.g. 60% to the proposer and 40% to the responder), offers in a UG explicitly framed either as a currency exchange or a windfall will closely conform to expectations for the frame and diverge substantially from the modal offer. Participants recruited from MTurk were randomized into one of two conditions. In the control condition, participants played a standard UG. In the treatment conditions, players were provided a vignette explicitly describing the frame with their roles: some were customers and bankers in a currency exchange, and others were in a windfall scenario. We predicted (i) that modal offers in the currency exchange would involve an asymmetric split where greater than 80% went to customers and less than 20% went to bankers, and (ii) that variation in windfall offers would converge onto a 50–50 split with significantly less variation than the control condition. Our first prediction was confirmed with substantial effect sizes ( d = 1.09 and d = −2.04), whereas we found no evidence for our second prediction. The first result provides further evidence that it is difficult to draw firm conclusions about economic decision-making from decontextualized games.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it