  We report on three pre-registered studies testing 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. In Study 1, recipients of an extreme dictator game
(where dictators can either take the whole pie for themselves or give it
entirely to the receiver) 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. Study 2 shows that people who
choose descriptions that make them more likely to receive a higher payoff
indeed believe that they will receive a higher payoff. Study 3 shows that
receivers are more likely than dictators to choose these descriptions. In sum,
our work suggests that some people choose descriptions that are beneficial to
themselves; we also found some evidence that deliberative thinking and young
age are associated with this tendency.
