BERKELEY, CA — Who is more altruistic: people inside or outside the adult entertainment industry? A pair of researchers from the University of California at Berkeley set out to answer that question during Cybernet Expo ’08 June 11th and 12th, and their results surprised them.The “field research” consisted of two experiments. In one, researchers Mitchell Hoffman and John Morgan asked subjects to make a decision about taking and giving dollar bills from envelopes, and then using the envelopes to send a message to others. In the other, participants played a classic “cheap talk” game designed to explore how people communicate with each other within different incentive structures.

“When we spoke to our colleagues about this project, we heard a wide array of views,” the researchers said. “Some people thought there would be differences in altruism and communication among adult entertainment professionals and students. Others thought the two groups would behave basically the same.”

Who is more altruistic? People in the adult industry, according to the results. The level of altruism in the envelope-passing experiment was more than 40 percent, compared to typical levels of around 20-percent in experiments with students.

“Future experiments are required to really nail down the answer, but it appears that adult professionals behave quite generously with one another,” the researchers noted.

They also attempted to answer a second question: How do online adult industry professionals communicate? From their results, the researchers determined social pressure did not have a large effect on communication.

“People made their decisions mostly not worrying about what other people were going to think, which makes sense if people in the industry are independent-minded,” the researchers said. “In contrast, money pressure did seem to affect the type of communication. This may reflect the disappearance of the online adult industry as something somewhat exotic and peripheral and its transition into focusing on revenue growth and serving customer needs.”

Hoffman and Morgan also investigated a third question: What do people think about how others communicate? Do they think that other people
will communicate like themselves, or do they recognize that different people communicate differently?

The answer is the latter, they determined: Nearly half of participants predicted others would play the envelope game differently than they did — a good guess given the broad range of playing styles.

“People in the adult industry appear to play certain games more generously than students, and the way they communicate responds differently to different types of pressure,” the researchers concluded. “More research is needed to study this large and important industry.”

Similar experiments have been conducted with college students in Israel and Spain, they said.