AIAS newsletter Autumn 2012 TW.indd

34
Interview with Maarten Berg
FOCUS ON...
RESEARCH
A solidarity experiment in the Dapperbuurt
Laboratory experiments are becoming increasingly popular among social scientists. By letting subjects play a game
in an environment that is fully under control – the lab – it is possible to fi ne tune the conditions under which people
interact. Thus, one can draw inferences about the causal relationship between these conditions and their behaviour.
Students are the obvious group to select the participants for these experiments from. However, one may question
whether the behaviour of university students really refl ects the behaviour of the population at large, especially if these
students are used to participate in laboratory experiments. It is therefore of great interest to compare the behaviour
of students with the behaviour of ‘ordinary’ people in the same experimental design. This was put to practice in the
experiments that AIAS researcher Maarten Berg performed as part of the research programme ‘Solidarity in the 21st
Century’.
What kind of experiment did you perform?
In the basic experiment, four participants
had to answer individually ten multiple
choice questions. The two participants who
performed the best on this quiz were declared
to be the winners. They were each
rewarded with 20 euro’s that they were allowed
to distribute over the four group
members (including themselves). They were
free to choose any possible distribution, e.g.
keep all 20 euro’s to themselves, to distribute
the sum equally (5-5-5-5), or to do something
else. Because the participants actually
earned real money with this ‘solidarity game’
(and lost real money by sharing), sharing behaviour
in this experiment is strong proof
of the potential for solidarity. A problem
of standard survey research (“How much
would you be willing to share....?”) is that
is very vulnerable to socially desirable statements.
However, the main research focus
was not the degree of solidarity, but rather
the differences in solidarity between slightly
different experimental conditions.
Why did you choose the visitors of the
Dapper market, a daily street market
in Amsterdam, to participate in the experiments?
The starting point of our project, ‘Solidarity
in the 21st century’, was that solidarity in
Dutch society might be endangered by societal
developments, such as the aging population
(creating a potential confl ict between
generations) and increasing cultural diversity.
The Dappermarket is a very diverse
area of Amsterdam, and therefore very well
suited to study some of our hypotheses. An
additional benefi t was that Laurens Buijs, a
sociologist from our team, did qualitative research
in the Dappermarket area. This enabled
us to compare and integrate our fi ndings,
using very different methodologies.
How did you convince people on the
market to participate?
Actually, this was very hard. We had to approach
at least ten persons (and sometimes
many more) to convince one person to
participate. An additional complication was
that we needed groups of exact four participants.
This meant that occasionally we lost
a potential participant, who was no longer
willing to wait for the other participants to
show up. With the great help of Laurens,
Casper and others, we managed to do it after
all.
I think that a big problem was that people
are so used to being approached (by people
who want their money) that they did not
realize that they would actually earn money
with this experiment. After the experiment,
participants were often grateful for receiving
so much money for so little effort.
What were the largest problems/obstacles
that you were confronted with
in performing the experiment in the
Dapperbuurt?
Besides having to approach the potential
participants on the market, we had to create
a lab in a community centre (‘buurthuis’)
nearby. As the participants communicated
with one another through computers,
Casper had to create a network. We ran into
all kinds of practical challenges, especially
when participants did not fully understand
the instructions or were far from fl uent in
the Dutch language. Fortunately, for most
participants this was not the case.
Can you tell us the most remarkable
differences between the outcomes of
the experiment with the students and
with the visitors of the Dapperbuurt?
In the Dapperbuurt experiment we were especially
interested in the characteristics of
the participants (e.g. in terms of sex, age,
cultural background, etc.) and the social
distance between them. When we used students
they were anonymous to one another
(player 1, player 2, etc.). Our results showed
that native participants share less money
with Turkish or Moroccan people than with
fellow natives.
Another difference between the two studies
was that the participants from the Dap-