How (un)informative are experiments with students for other social groups? A study of agricultural students and farmers
How (un)informative are experiments with students for other social groups? A study of agricultural students and farmers
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DOI：
10.1111/1467-8489.12485
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发表时间：
2022-06-24
影响因子：
3.2
通讯作者：
Musshoff，Oliver
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Gruener，Sven;Lehberger，Mira;Musshoff，Oliver
实验通常用于研究受控环境下的个人决策。由于机会成本低和高可用性，大学生经常被招募为研究人口。尽管与感兴趣的社会群体的代表相比，他们在许多特征（例如年龄和收入）方面是相当不典型的，但学生的实验行为有时会过早地推广到其他社会群体，甚至是一般的人类。鉴于农业和环境部门面临的广泛挑战，解决农民的决策问题尤为重要。我们分析了农业专业的学生是否可以用来近似的行为，农民在简单的经济实验，这往往是用来衡量风险规避，不耐烦，积极的互惠，消极的互惠，利他主义和信任。此外，我们认为系统不同的货币激励的作用。我们发现，农业学生和农民的风险厌恶没有差异，农民的积极互惠和信任正相关的激励水平，这不能观察到与农业学生。关于利他主义在两个群体中的发现是混合的，并挑战了早期研究的学生不那么亲社会的发现。农业学生是不耐烦和消极互惠的下限。这些异质性的结果表明，从农业学生到农民的科学推断应该谨慎。然而，我们并不涉及目标人群的代表性样本（例如性别）。需要重复研究来评估我们发现的普遍性。
Experiments are often used to study individual decision‐making under controlled circumstances. Due to their low opportunity costs and high availability, university students are frequently recruited as the study population. Even though they are rather untypical with regard to many characteristics (e.g. age and income) compared to the representatives of the social group of interest, the experimental behaviours of students are sometimes prematurely generalised to other social groups or even to humans in general. Given the widespread challenges in the agricultural and environmental sector, it is particularly interesting to address farmers' decision‐making. We analyse whether agricultural students can be used to approximate the behaviour of farmers in simple economic experiments, which are often used to measure risk aversion, impatience, positive reciprocity, negative reciprocity, altruism and trust. Moreover, we consider the role of systematically varied monetary incentives. We find no differences between agricultural students and farmers in their risk aversion; farmers' positive reciprocity and trust are positively associated with the incentive level, which cannot be observed with agricultural students. Findings regarding altruism in the two populations are mixed and challenge the finding of earlier studies of students being less pro‐social. Agricultural students are a lower boundary of impatience and negative reciprocity. These heterogeneous results suggest that scientific inference from agricultural students to farmers should be made cautiously. However, we do not deal with a representative sample of our target population (e.g. gender). Replication studies are required to evaluate the generalisability of our findings.