Gaming Anthropology: The Problem of External Validity and the Challenge of Interpreting Experimental Games
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Gaming Anthropology: The Problem of External Validity and the Challenge of Interpreting Experimental Games

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Details:

  • Journal Title:
    American Anthropologist
  • Personal Author:
    Naar, Nicole ORCID ICON IMG
  • NOAA Program & Office:
    Sea Grant
  • Sea Grant Program:
    WASHU (Washington Sea Grant)
  • Description:
    Experimental economic games are an increasingly common component of the anthropological tool kit. Yet their external validity continues to be a point of debate and active empirical investigation within economics and anthropology. I review and reorganize central concepts within the experimental economic game literature on external validity and find that—consistent with anthropological assumptions of cultural variability—game results are not reliably generalizable across different participants or contexts. However, whether or not game behavior parallels real‐world behavior within the same participants or contexts remains an open question. Methodological diversity is a strength of anthropology as a discipline, and therefore anthropologists are well poised to design more effective tests of parallelism in the future. In the meantime, anthropologists borrowing experimental methods from economics should treat the relationship between behavior inside and outside of games as an open empirical question. They should also carefully consider whether the method is consistent with their theoretical assumptions and research goals. [experimental economic games, external validity, generalizability, parallelism, anthropological methods]
  • Keywords:
  • Source:
    American Anthropologist, 122(4), 784-798
  • DOI:
  • ISSN:
    0002-7294;1548-1433;
  • Format:
    PDF
  • Publisher:
    Wiley
  • Document Type:
    Journal Article
  • Rights Information:
    Accepted Manuscript
  • Compliance:
    Library
  • Main Document Checksum:
  • Download URL:
  • File Type:

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