Laboratory experiment reveals altered altruistic sharing among nonparticipants during civil unrest in Türkiye, highlighting distinct prosocial dynamics during periods of mass protest.
Key Points
To examine whether individual cooperation, fairness enforcement, and altruism changed during the 2013 Gezi Park protests in Türkiye across protest participants and nonparticipants.
Conducted laboratory experiments in Türkiye measuring economic decision-making before and during the Gezi Park protests.
Assessed decision-making across three standard experimental paradigms: a modified dictator game, an ultimatum game, and a public goods game.
Protest participants displayed rates of equal-payoff choices in the modified dictator game, punishment in the ultimatum game, and cooperation rewards in the public goods game that did not differ qualitatively from pre-protest baselines.
Nonparticipants mirrored pre-protest behaviors in the ultimatum and public goods games, but showed a marked reduction in willingness to forgo selfish payoffs for a partner's benefit in the modified dictator game.