Foundations of Human Sociality, Ernst Fehr and Colin F. Camerer compare the role and scope of experimental games in the study of human sociality to that of a first sketch or outline in the process of an artist's conception of a painting. Just like a rough draft, experimental games are, as Camerer and Fehr put it, "reductions of social phenomena to something extremely simple" (Camerer and Fehr 2004: 85). By abstracting from contingent details and by reducing complex phenomena to some of their basic (and perhaps essential) features, experimental games allow for "comparability across subject pools" (ibid.: 84), a feature of which the volume from which the quote is taken is itself a most impressive example.Yet it has to be said that reduction is always dangerous, and the art of drawing offers an excellent example for the adventures of simplification: if too many details, redundancies and apparently contingent features are left out, people might misunderstand the sketch. In his Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry has the narrator learning this the hard way when the little boy draws his "Drawing Number One' — a giant snake digesting an elephant — only to learn to his disappointment that the adults mistake the lumpy blob with two lines tapering off to both sides to be a rendering of a hat! The lesson is that for all their simplicity, rough outlines need more interpretative work from the side of the beholder than more detailed pictures. And the more reductive a rendering, the more easily it is misunderstood. The question is: could this also be true of game experimental "sketches'? How do we know what an experiment is about in terms of real-life social phenomena?" /> Social identities in experimental economics - Schmid Hans Bernhard | sdvig press