The dictator game is a very simple game in experimental economics that touches on the altruistic value in humans. The game is simple. You participate for the experiment and are seated in a room along with one of the people running the experiment. They give you ten one dollar bills which you are then allowed to keep no matter what. You are not the only one in the experiment, however, and there will be someone coming in next after you leave. Do you wish to give any of your money to them? If you do, you will leave with whatever is left out of the ten dollars and they will start with ten dollars – like you did – plus the amount you donated to them. You won’t get a chance to see them and they won’t see you, so it’s completely anonymous – no one ever knows of your generosity and they cannot thank you for it. Of course, there are no other people in the experiment and each participant is presented with the same choice.

On average, three dollars is typically donated proving that humans are innately altruistic.

Let’s run the experiment one more time except this time let’s change the amount you are allowed to give from -$1 to $10, -1 being that you can now take one dollar from the next person. On average the number was zero for this experiment, proving that humans are not all that altruistic this time.

Now let’s run the experiment one last time but further change the amount you are allowed to give from -$10 to $10. So now you are able to take all ten dollars of the next person an and leave with twenty dollars if you so choose. What do you think the results of this experiment turned out to be?

On average, -$1.5 dollars was chosen; the participants anonymously stole $1.5 dollars from the next person.

This was just one of the stories told by Stephen Dubner at his guest lecture at UNCG on March 25. Although he does not proclaim himself to be an economist or even to know anything worthwhile in the field, he co-authored Freakonomics with Steven Levitt – who, incidentally, is an economist. Knowing that Dubner is not an economist but rather a journalist is important to realize beforehand as the book is a record of dozens of economic anomalies presented in a very easy to understand and enjoyable fashion (the Dubner aspect of the book, I suppose).

On the whole, the lecture proved to be very interesting. Dubner was able to just appear on stage and instantly dive into an hour long lecture as if it were a comfortable conversation piece. He easily segwayed from one economic topic on to another and made the audience forget that each topic, which was presented more like a story, was on the often-boring and mundane subject of economics, which is often called the dismal science as it tries to reduce the splendors of life down to mathematical equations.

The other interesting story of the lecture was the story of Yale economist Keith Chen and his idea of introducing the notion of bartering with money to capuchin monkeys. The purpose was to introduce the idea of exchanging money for food and see if the monkeys somehow exhibited some sort of behavior that we humans could learn from.

The enclosure was separated into two main cages, one where several capuchins lived and another which was empty where the assistants would interact with the monkeys. The two rooms were separated by a gate. Every day, Chen and his assistants would open the gate to let one monkey into the empty room and give him several small plastic discs. They would then take them out of the monkey’s hands as they gave him grapes. They repeated this process for several months until they monkeys began to understand that when they give the humans two discs they receive a bowl a grapes. This was the first phase of the experiment.

Chen then began to alter certain aspects of the monetary system. For instance, they raised the price of grapes to four discs while leaving the price of bananas to two. The capuchins picked up on the price hike and went without the more expensive but tastier grapes in favor of the bananas in order to save more discs. Another incident of the price hike was the robbery of several discs. One day when the capuchin was in the empty room and presented a tray full of discs he smashed the tray backwards so that the discs flew into the other room for everyone else. The monkeys exhibited a lot of the same behaviors that humans do with money, even in hard times.

It was during this time that Chen noticed something very unexpected. He watched one of the male capuchins gather several discs from his private stash, walk up to one of the females, give all of the discs to her, have sex with her and then walk away. Chen had witnessed capuchin prostitution.

One last interesting tidbit that I picked up from the lecture was that of the realtor and pimp and the value they bring to the table. If you’re trying to sell your house, hiring a realtor to sell it will yield a smaller return on investment than a prostitute who uses a pimp. Dubner calls this the “pimpact.”