Experimental insights on antisocial behavior: two meta-analyses

Abstract We report two meta-analyses on the determinants of antisocial behavior in experimental settings in which such behavior is not rationally motivated by pecuniary incentives. The first meta-analysis employs aggregate data from 95 published and unpublished studies (24,086 participants), using laboratory, field and online experiments carried out since 2000. We find that antisocial behavior depends significantly on the experimental setting, being highest in vendetta games and lowest in social dilemmas. As we find significant heterogeneity across the studies, including across game classes, in the second meta-analysis, we focus only on “Joy of Destruction” (JoD) and money-burning (MB) experiments, for which we have the most observations, 51 studies and around 16,784 participants. Overall, our findings suggest that procedural fairness and being observed by others reduce the frequency of antisocial behavior. Online and field experiments display more antisocial behavior than laboratory experiments. We also find that the strategy method biases antisocial behavior upward. However, we do not find evidence for a positive publication bias being correlated with higher destructive behavior, either in the general meta-analysis or in relation to JoD/MB experiments; if anything, there is evidence of a negative publication bias. The JoD/MB meta-analysis finds evidence of a price effect for destruction frequency, negative discrimination against outsiders, within-subject designs underestimating destructive behavior, and more antisocial behavior in one-shot interactions. Collectively, our results point to the value of more laboratory experiments that systematically build on paradigmatic experimental designs to enable comparability and the identification of key economic drivers of antisocial behavior.