The Online Wheel: Luck, Effort and Redistribution under Transparency
Creators: name: Wiese, Juliane
name: Powdthavee, Nattavudh
name: Xiong-Wei, Jonathan
name: Riyanto, Yohanes
Publisher: name: Open Science Framework
Year: 2022
Subjects: subject: Economics
subject: Social and Behavioral Sciences
subject: Psychology
subject: FOS: Psychology
subject: Altruism
subject: Luck in life
subject: Redistribution
subject: Social status
subject: Success in life
subject: Survivorship bias
subject: Transparency

description: Most people can agree that outcomes in life boil down to some combination of luck and hard work/effort. There is evidence to suggest that as a self-serving bias, we have a tendency to alter our attribution to luck and effort depending on the outcomes we experience (Franck, 2016; Kelley &amp; Michela, 1980; Zuckerman 1979). This allows us to explain our failures with bad luck and our successes with our own hard work. Furthermore, survivorship bias implies that we are likely to attribute success of those who “make it big” in life (e.g.: the Steve Jobs’ and Mark Zuckerbergs of the world) to their hard work and creativity, without taking into account the complete dataset of individuals who also have traits of creativity and genius, but lacked the good dose of luck required to turn that creativity and genius into success. This can lead to a tendency to understate the role of luck in success, causing successful people to feel deserving of their achievements. This sense of deservingness or entitlement can come as a threat to altruistic behaviour, which more humbly acknowledges the role of luck in life’s success. Our research aims to examine the extent to which altruistic behaviour (namely, the overall winner’s redistributive choices in a collaborative game) changes when transparency around other peoples’ luck and effort is revealed to the winner. There is already an extensive literature which shows that people have a tendency to exploit uncertainties or ambiguous information, allowing them to make self-serving decisions without compromising their moral self-image (see Dana et al., 2012). In exploring how uncertainty about procedural fairness influences altruistic decision-making, Hansson et al. (2021) have found that providing general information about the level playing field of a game can reduce selfishness. Our research adds to the literature by exploring the impact of transparency around survivorship bias – that is, highlighting the fact that the failure of others is due to the same chance that contributed to one’s own success – on altruistic behavior. This research highlights a particular type of level playing field which has previously not been explored, namely, the fact that survivorship bias limits our ability to view the luck and outcomes of those who are unsuccessful, leading us to attribute their failure to a shortcoming on their part, rather than a result of chance. Understanding this can help us to better understand whether altruistic attitudes of those who’ve “made it” in life can be influenced by making salient the fact that a significant portion of that success is due to luck. In sum, we will explore how transparency of other peoples’ outcomes influences redistribution choices when the outcomes are reliant purely on luck, in contrast to the change in redistribution as a result of transparency of outcomes that are a combination of luck and effort.