Semester 2, 2019-2020
Type of courseMethodological and Practical Courses
DateApril 17, 2020
LocationLeiden University, room to be announced.
1 day
Maximum number of participants30
ECTS0.5 EC will be appointed for participation in the complete course
StaffWelmer Molenmaker (Leiden University), Manon Schutter (Leiden University) + 3 guest speakers
Content, learning goals, preparation
This workshop provides a theoretical and practical introduction to Economic Games (EGs) for social psychological researchers. EGs are straight-forward decision-making tasks used to study social interactions across a wide variety of scientific disciplines, including anthropology, biology, behavioral economics, sociology, and of course psychology. This widespread use is not surprising, since EGs (1) capture the essence of social interactions without having to provide a context that may have unintended connotations, (2) are, despite the simplicity in terms of structure, versatile in terms of the emotions, cognitions, and motives they may activate, (3) allow for direct comparisons between different types of EGs, and (4) are suited for an interdisciplinary approach. Together with three guest speakers, we will discuss and demonstrate how EGs can be used in social psychological research.
This one-day workshop will start with an expert talk by dr. Jorg Gröss on the basics of Economic Game Theory to provide you with the theoretical foundations of EGs. In the afternoon, the workshop will focus on the more practical part of using EGs in social psychological research and showcase some best practices. To illustrate how EGs can be applied to specific research questions, we first have dr. Nils Köbis presenting work on cheating and corruption. Second, dr. Tony Evans will talk about the use of EGs in real-interaction experiments, and the opportunities and challenges of running such synchronous experiments in the lab and online using the Python-based software oTree. To close the day, we will give a demonstration of some EGs in our (new) Social Interaction Lab. This demonstration will give you first-hand experience with EGs as experimental paradigm to study social interactions, but will not provide training on how to program them.