What happens when you move science out of the lab and into a public space? Researchers from the Donders Institute wanted to know how people make decisions about fairness, not in a controlled laboratory setting, but ’in the wild’. Through the Donders Citylab, they were able to collect data from thousands of museum visitors and gained new insights that might otherwise have been missed.
Social equality is important for a well-functioning society, and understanding how people respond when they are treated unfairly helps us learn how people think about fairness. To explore this, a classic fairness decision-making task was embedded on interactive touchscreen kiosks in the waiting hall of the muZIEum in Nijmegen. Over a period of 13 months, more than 11,000 museum visitors voluntarily performed this task while waiting for their tour to begin. This allowed the researchers to capture decisions made in an authentic, unsupervised setting and, importantly, in a broad cross-section of the public.
New insights about fairness decision-making
In their publication in , they describe that this approach did not only allow the replication of earlier findings, but also revealed new insights about how people react when someone is acting unfairly towards them and how people voluntarily seek information about others before deciding how to make fair decisions. The large dataset, spanning young adolescents to senior citizens, also uncovered patterns about fairness decisions that would likely not have been possible if the data were collected in a standard laboratory setting, such as how we become more tolerant of being treated unfairly the older we get, and also how the time of the day can impact our motivation to seek out information.
Why citizen science?
This lab-in-the-field approach was supported by the Donders Citylab , an initiative that aims to bridge scientific research and public engagement. By meeting people where they already are, this this citizen science initiative both expands the diversity of participants and invites a wider audience to engage with science as an active contributor rather than a passive consumer. The study’s lead author, Sarah Vahed, PhD candidate at the Donders Institute, also wrote a blog post for Springer Nature , elaborating on the motivations and experiences of conducting this citizen science project.