We recruited 431 US American participants online via MTurk ($0.35 payment per participant). 75 were excluded, leaving a final sample of 356 people (170 female, M age = 38.46, SD age = 11.20). We aimed to recruit at least 400 participants to account for any exclusions. Sample size was determined before data collection"
It is interesting to see people preferring to have a higher variance in welfare (implication of q2), however it could also be related to the US culture of having a large inequality (which may or may not be a good thing).
Do you have plans to repeat this work for other cultures, like Europe or even further apart like Indonesia?
I don't think our findings suggest that people have a preference for populations with higher variance in welfare (i.e. greater differences in how how happy they are). All else equal, people probably have a strong preference for fair welfare distribution (even in the US). But sometimes they may choose the option that contains more welfare variance because this population has a higher average or total level (or for some other reasons).
I agree with you that it would be very interesting to do a cross cultural study. I don't have a specific hypothesis about cross cultural differences though. Note that there already exists some cross cultural research on fairness and prosocial behavior.
"Participants.
We recruited 431 US American participants online via MTurk ($0.35 payment per participant). 75 were excluded, leaving a final sample of 356 people (170 female, M age = 38.46, SD age = 11.20). We aimed to recruit at least 400 participants to account for any exclusions. Sample size was determined before data collection"
It is interesting to see people preferring to have a higher variance in welfare (implication of q2), however it could also be related to the US culture of having a large inequality (which may or may not be a good thing).
Do you have plans to repeat this work for other cultures, like Europe or even further apart like Indonesia?