[3] The results – where most "dictators" choose to send money – evidence the role of fairness and norms in economic behavior, and undermine the assumption of narrow self-interest when given the opportunity to maximise one's own profits.
Based on this limited scope, it is expected that the second player will accept any offer they are given, which is not necessarily seen in real world examples.
However, it was only in 1994 that a paper by Forsythe et al. simplified this to the contemporary form of this game with one decision-maker (the dictator) and one passive participant (the recipient).
If the dictator in the game has anonymity with the recipient, resulting in a high level of social distance, they are most likely to give less endowment, whereas players with a low level of social distance, whether they are very familiar with each other or shallowly acquainted, are more likely to give a higher proportion of the endowment to the recipient.
Within organizations, altruism and prosocial behavior are heavily relied on in dictator games for optimal organizational output.
These experimental results contradict the homo economicus model, suggesting that players in the dictator role take fairness and potential adverse consequences into account when making decisions about how much utility to give the recipient.
[8] A later study in neuroscience further challenged the homo economicus model, suggesting that various cognitive differences among humans affect decision-making processes, and thus ideas of fairness.
[2][8][10][11] These results appear robust: for example, Henrich et al. discovered in a wide cross-cultural study that dictators allocate a non-zero share of the endowment to the recipient.
[12] In modified versions of the dictator game, children also tend to allocate some of a resource to a recipient and most five-year-olds share at least half of their goods.
[19][20] Other experiments have shown a relationship between political participation, social integration, and dictator game giving, suggesting that it may be an externally valid indicator of concern for the well-being of others.
[21][22][23][24] Regarding altruism, recent papers have shown that experimental subjects in a lab environment do not behave differently to other participants in an outside setting.
[26][27] The idea that the highly mixed results of the dictator game prove or disprove rationality in economics is not widely accepted.
Results offer both support of the classical assumptions and notable exceptions which have led to improved holistic economic models of behavior.
[32] A pair of studies published in 2008 of identical and fraternal twins in the US and Sweden suggests that behavior in this game is heritable.
[34] Initially coined by Bohnet and Zeckhauser, betrayal aversion could prevent the trustor from not trusting the trustee due to the social risk of having zero payoffs.
[34] Their study looked at a practical experiment where participants were randomly paired with one another to increase the probability that the outcome would be dependent on the actions of the trustee selected.
[16] To examine whether giving in dictator games stems from sense of fairness, Andreoni and Bernheim (2009) conducted an experiment in which participants were given $20 to distribute.
As part of the experiment, the recipients and the dictators were publicly identified, and the final allocation was announced at the end of the study.
[35] Snir (2014) further explored these dynamics by allowing dictators to determine the probability of selecting each of three possible allocations of €12 between themselves and a recipient: The findings indicate that, on average, dictators chose the selfish allocation (Option A) 70% of the time, regardless of whether the recipients were only aware of the outcomes or also knew the probabilities.
[36] Forsythe et al. (1994) found that doubling the available sum from $5 to $10 did not change the proportion of the “pie” the dictator allocated to the recipient.
[44] Goeree et al. (2010) conducted a study mapping students' social networks in a California high school.
[48] Brañas-Garza (2007) conducted a dictator game where participants received an instructional note stating: "Remember, the decision is yours."