Motivated Memory in Dictator Games

The memory people have of their past actions is one of the main sources of information about themselves. To study whether people retrieve their memory self-servingly, we designed an experiment in which participants have first to play binary dictator games and, second, recall the amounts allocated to the receiver. We investigate whether dictators:(i) exhibit poorer recalls, (ii) over-estimate more often and,(iii) to a larger extent the receiver's amount when they have chosen the selfish option. We find that introducing monetary incentives for memory accuracy increases the dictators' percentage of correct recalls only when they have chosen the altruistic option. The percentage of correct recalls of the dictators is lower when they have chosen the selfish option, showing that amnesia is more likely to affect selfish than altruistic dictators. However, dictators do not bias strategically the direction and magnitude of their recalls