Effect of Task Familiarity on Social-Preference Measurement

Determine how methodological familiarity with an experimental task and repeated exposure to its instructions affect the measurement of social preferences and the observed differentiation among in-, middle-, and out-groups.

Background

Differentiated treatment of the middle-group emerges after participants encounter the instructions and group constellation a second time, rather than gradually across rounds. The authors therefore identify an unresolved question about whether this change reflects familiarity with the task and how such familiarity may affect measurements of social preferences in experiments.

References

This leads to important questions about how effects in experiments are influenced by the familiarity and repeated exposure to instructions and a task in the domain of social preferences. Future studies should investigate specifically this question, how the methodological familiarity with a task changes the measurement of social preferences in experiments.

— Going Beyond the In-/Out-Group Dichotomy: Investigating Altruism towards Middle-Groups  (2609.09046 - Houf et al., 8 Sep 2026) in Section 5, Discussion and Conclusion