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Department of Sociology / ICS

Utrecht School of Economics / TKI

Rules for Proper Laboratory Behavior


1) Subscribe to the participants database.

  • You only receive invitations to participate in a study if you subscribed to the participants database.
  • Invitations and other messages are sent by e-mail to the address you specified.
  • Read the rules that we follow and confirm that you agree with them.
  • Do not fake information.
  • Do not subscribe more than once.
  • You can unsubscribe any time you wish.


2) Register for a session.

  • Participation is voluntary. Each time you receive an invitation, you can decide freely, whether or not you wish to participate in the specific study.
  • If you wish to participate, you need to follow the link in the e-mail, choose a session and register for it.
  • Register for a session, only if:
    • you indeed have time to come. In case something unexpectedly crosses your plans (e. g., illness), inform the researcher of that study as soon as possible. Do your best to do so at least 24 hours before the respective session starts.
    • you have a sufficiently good command of the language in which the study will be conducted. Information about the language will always be provided in the invitation message.
    • the invitation was originally sent to you.
  • Usually, you will receive a reminder by e-mail for the session you registered for.


3) Show-up for the session.

  • Come to ELSE for participating in the session.
  • Be on time!
  • If you registered, but do not turn up or turn up late:
    • other participants have to wait for you.
    • the session could have been cancelled because of a lack of participants.
    • other participants could have been required to leave because specific numbers of participants are needed per session for most studies.
  • It is possible that you cannot participate (e.g., due to technical problems or because we need a certain exact number of participants).
  • If you registered and showed-up in time, you will receive at least a (show-up) payment of 5 EURO.
  • In case more participants show up than needed for the session, the first registered persons arriving at ELSE will participate.
  • If you registered for a session, but did not show up in time without informing the researcher in advance or without providing a plausible reason for cancelling afterwards :
    • we will keep track of these instances in the participants database.
    • after three times, you will not be invited for future experiments at ELSE.

4) Participate according to the instructions.

  • During a session, carefully follow the instructions of the researcher.
  • Take all questions in our study seriously, also those questions that do not affect your payment.
  • After each session, confirm the amount of money you received by signing a receipt and leave the receipt to the researcher. This is required because of financial controlling by accountants of the University. We need these signed receipts to prove that we spent the money for our research. These receipts are not used in any other way than for proving that the money was spent for research.
  • At any time during the experiment, you can notify the experiment leader and stop with the experiment, if you are concerned about answering some questions and doing some of the requested tasks.
  • Do not spread information about the content of a study to people who will participate in future sessions of that study. Such information does not affect the earnings, but can undermine our studies or even make the data unusable.



For questions please contact experiment@elseutrecht.nl.