Honesty-Humility and Economic Games: The Role of Power

Abstract

Antisocial behaviours are related to certain personality constructs, such as low Honesty- Humility, as well as high levels of perceived power. However, Honesty-Humility, power, and behaviour (examined using economic games specifically) have yet to be examined in combination. I therefore examined the intersection of personality, performance on economic games and the influence of power to better understand these interactions. I used an experimental design with103 first-year undergraduate students who were randomly assigned to either a powerful (permitted to use executive office chair and new desktop) or powerless (made to use old, metal stool and broken laptop) condition before playing three economic games: dictator, ultimatum, and ultimatum variation. I hypothesized that those lower in Honest-Humility (H) would allocate more points to themselves in all games but more so in the dictator game and this effect would be exacerbated in the powerful condition. While the power manipulation had no effect on point allocation regardless of score on the HEXACO personality inventory, when combined with data from a previous study (Farrell, 2018), H was significantly negatively associated with the number of points they kept to themselves in the dictator game. In the ultimatum variation game, Agreeableness (A) was significantly negatively correlated with points allocated to self. Replicating previous findings by Farrell (2018), the dictator game significantly correlated with prior high school bullying tendencies. These findings suggest that economic games could be used as a bullying proxy to study the phenomenon in laboratory settings.