Strange dictators
An old game is turned upside down, and the results are surprising
6 min readApr 7, 2017
An old favourite in behavioural science, often wheeled out to show that we are not ‘rational’, is the Dictator Game. According to standard economic theory, people should be acting to maximize their own economic gain. This is not the behaviour observed, and so the game can be seen as an indicator of our ‘irrational’ altruism…