‘Doing’ Laboratory Experiments: An Ethnomethodological Study of the Performative Practice in Behavioral Economic Research

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the research practice in a behavioral economics laboratory setting. The ethnomethodological perspective is used to direct the attention to the ethnomethods or performative practices generating the situation in the laboratory. I outlined some detailed field observations to illustrate how economists not only produce laboratory situations in accordance with their research methods and the scientific rules of their epistemic community. I also show how these situations are challenged, tested, and sustained by the equally performative behavior of compliant or non-compliant participants, by carrot and stick through punishment and payment. I will argue that economists not only study but also (re-)produce the economic rational actor model and its defining elements. The economists’ rational actor thus matches the practices of his creation and has to be viewed as an empirical phenomenon from the ethnomethodological procedural perspective of ‘doing.’

I am grateful to the Berlin Social Science Research Center (WZB) for funding. I would like to thank Nina Bonge, Rustamdjan Hakimov, and the laboratory staff for teaching me how to act properly in the laboratory. I am especially grateful to Dorothea Kübler and Rustamdjan Hakimov for their openness to reflect about their own research practice and Michael Hutter who supported the sociological perspective in various stimulating discussions with our economic colleagues. Parts of the article base on a revisited version of Böhme (2015a).