A relevance, distinctiveness and plausibility (RDP) analysis is a conceptual framework that can be used to identify when potential confounds are a problem for interpreting experimental results. We illustrate this analysis using the creation or enhancement of natural group identity by the means...

This note paper considers briefly whether dictator games are a good tool to measure altruism. The answer is negative: behavior in dictator games is seriously confounded by what I shall label experimenter demand effects. Section 2 briefly defines dictator games and reviews some of its purported...

Economists have two basic methodologies: structuralism, in which formal economic models control the analysis, and experimentalism, in which economic theory guides the analysis, but data from experiments determines the policy recommendation. The choice between the two approaches is often quite...

In this article, the author offers a discussion of the evidential role of the Galilean constant in the history of physics. The author argues that measurable constants help theories constrain data. Theories are engines for research, and this helps explain why the Duhem-Quine thesis does not...

In the social sciences we hardly can create laboratory conditions, we only can try to find out which kinds of experiments Nature has carried out. Knowledge about Nature’s designs can be used to infer conditions for reliable predictions. This problem was explicitly dealt with in Haavelmo’s...

The assessment of models in an experiment depends on their material nature and their function in the experiment. Models that are used to make the phenomenon under investigation visible - sensors - are assessed by calibration. However, calibration strategies assume material intervention. The...

As a stress test of experimenter demand effects, we run an experiment where subjects can physically destroy coupons awarded to them. About one subject out of three does. Giving money back to the experimenter is possible in a separate task but is more consistent with an experimenter demand effect...

We propose a technique for assessing robustness of behavioral measures and treatment effects to experimenter demand effects. The premise is that by deliberately inducing demand in a structured way we can measure its influence and construct plausible bounds on demand-free behavior. We provide...

A leading approach to understanding significant discrepancies between observed willingness to pay (WTP) and willingness to accept (WTA) in policy evaluation is the “endowment effect” — that preferences are based on a reference point or anchor that leads WTA to exceed WTP. Unlike assertions...

The paper analyses the methodology of economic lab experiments on human behaviour in the light of Barad's ‘agential realism'. Experimenters conventionally think that experiments identify properties that human individuals have, independent from the experimental setting (the ‘preferences' or...