Playing with words: Do people exploit loaded language to affect others' decisions for their own benefit?
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In this article, we study whether people in the position of describing a decision problem to decision-makers exploit this opportunity for their benefit, by choosing descriptions that may be potentially beneficial for themselves. To this end, we design, pre-register, and conduct an experiment in which dictator game recipients are asked to choose the instructions used to introduce the game to dictators, among six different instructions that are known from previous research to affect dictators' decisions. The results demonstrate that some dictator game recipients tend to choose instructions that make them more likely to receive a higher payoff. Finally, we found some evidence that young age and deliberative thinking are associated with this tendency.
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