*3.3. Students' Reflections*

Students' reflections were collected just after running the experiment. They first answered a questionnaire, and then reflections were discussed in the classroom. The questionnaire contained questions related to the experiment: What was it about, incentives, similarities to ordinary life situations, and students' self-perception about social values, mainly trust and reciprocity. Table 7 reports the students' main answers.



Dividing up the students' answers by treatment, we found differences among the three main answers to the question about the best game strategy (Figure 5). In T0, 75 percent of the students thought that a collaborative strategy was the best one, falling to 50 percent in T1. In T1, more than one-third of the students identify no strategy. Thus, students are shown to be more prone to collaborate in T0 (with equal initial endowments) than in T1, when they were made aware of any differences in wealth emerging during the experiment. Thus far, the teacher/experimenter only acted as an activity organizer.

**Figure 5.** Identified strategies through the questionnaire concerning the MTG, per treatment.

A week after the experiment, the discussion stage took place. First, the students were grouped according to their chosen reading(s). They dynamically participated giving opinions/reflections about the content of the reading(s). Next, the teacher asked the students to answer two questions to relate the readings to the game: *What topic do the readings have in common? What is the link between the game and the reading?* To the first question, students provided answers that fit the topic. However, many of them found it difficult to answer the second question since they were unable to uncover the game's purpose. At this point, the teacher intervened and briefly explained the game's meaning and the collaborative strategy as one leading to the common good. Then students were asked to review, write, and hand-in their individual answers. Table 8 summarizes the students' answers that best fit the topic.


**Table 8.** Students' answers to readings-and-game-related questions.

#### **4. Discussion and Further Extensions**

In this paper, we designed an active learning activity for teaching social values under a sustainable education approach. Sustainable education posits that socio-economic systems should be understood as a dynamic organism and not as a fixed structure, where human relationships [41] and interdependences are crucial for improving living standards [4].

We took advantage of the versatility of the experimental methodology to allow students to engage in a multi-task activity. Students carried out three types of tasks, and their progressive active participation was required to foster a deep learning of abstract concepts. The activity required students to critically reflect on the interdependences and interconnections involved in the sustainability of systems. Likewise, it allowed them to experience how their decisions may a ffect the decisions of others and social welfare in general.

This paper addresses a research question on the sharing decisions of undergraduate students in an experimental setting, where they play a repeated trust game. The existence of e ffects on students' decisions related to 'wealth' inequality and gender was assumed. Additionally, degree studies [38–40] and attitudinal questions [36,37] were included as explanatory variables within a linear regression model.

To investigate the existence of a "wealth" inequality e ffect, students performed two experiments, with and without information about such gap. On average, having information about the other's accumulated earnings in the game does have an e ffect on students' sharing decisions, as claimed in Hypotheses 1 and 2. The fact that the e ffect is negative indicates that students decide to send and return smaller amounts in the experiment with the other's information and show a lower propensity to cooperate with each other. This result is in line with the literature related to public good games, which provides strong evidence from laboratory and field experiments that reveal that people's pro-social behavior is conditional on the social behavior of others, which is known as 'conditional cooperation'. Thus, one's decision to contribute to a common (good) fund may depend on the information available about the others' decisions, as well as on one's own type or on psychological traits [42–44].

In behavioral and experimental economics, the gender question is constantly investigated. There exists a general idea that women show more sensitivity to social issues and exhibit a greater willingness to help others than men. Specifically, in works on trust, reciprocity, and cooperation, the results on gender di fferences are ambiguous or contradictory [28,29,45–48] and context-dependent or design-dependent [49,50].

Experimental findings follow two main lines. On the one hand, most studies on trust games indicate that men that take on the role of trustor transfer a greater average amount than women in the same role [28,29,45]. Specifically, as a percentage of the amount sent by men, women send 14.52% less than men in Dittrich's [28], 9.48% less in Croson and Buchan's [29], and 14.62% less in Buchan, Croson and Solnick's work [45]. This gender di fference is explained in terms of a di fferent degree of risk-aversion between men and women, higher in the latter. In contrast, in the role of trustee, women return a greater average amount than men. Thus, women show higher levels of reciprocity than men [29,45,47,48]. More specifically, in terms of the return rate, women return more than men, on average: 12.22% *versus* −14.2% in Croson and Buchan's work [29] and −0.4% *versus* −13.6% in Buchan, Croson and Solnick's work [45]. In contrast, Dittrich's work [28] found that trustee women transfer a

lower amount than that of trustee men; −7.08% of the amount transferred by men. On the other hand, other studies applying public good games to evaluate behaviors and decisions that favor cooperation have not found a powerful gender e ffect on such behaviors and decisions [51].

The present paper contributes by providing new evidence on the gender e ffect in an information context. We hypothesized a potential di fference between men's and women's sharing decisions in the roles of trustor (Hypothesis 3) and trustee (Hypothesis 4). Our results are in line with those above. In the experiment with information, female students transferred a lower (greater) median amount than male-students in the role of trustor (trustee). By using average values, we found similar results to those provided by the aforementioned authors [28,29,45]: trustors (trustees) women sent 19.32% (139.66%) less (more) than men. In addition, trustee women gave a return rate of 0.57, and men returned a negative rate of −0.20. In the treatment without information, female students transferred a greater median amount than male students in the role of trustor, but no significant di fferences were found when they adopted the role of trustee, similar to those studies focused on cooperation [51,52]. By applying average values, trustors (trustees) women sent 58.51% (12.64%) more than men. Furthermore, trustee women (men) gave a return rate of 0.44 (0.41). In a nutshell, we found a gender e ffect depending on the experimental context [50].

To finish, this activity helped students to develop the ability to critically assess concepts and reflect on alternative economic paradigms. Introducing this kind of activity in class may stimulate students to enhance their awareness about their participation in society, as well as encourage them to think and reflect in broad contexts beyond theoretical teaching [53].
