Caring and Sharing
Disposable Ties and the Urban Poor
Matthew Desmond
American Journal of Sociology, March 2012, Pages 1295-1335
Abstract:
Sociologists long have observed that the urban poor rely on kinship networks to survive economic destitution. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among evicted tenants in high-poverty neighborhoods, this article presents a new explanation for urban survival, one that emphasizes the importance of disposable ties formed between strangers. To meet their most pressing needs, evicted families often relied more on new acquaintances than on kin. Disposable ties facilitated the flow of various resources, but often bonds were brittle and fleeting. The strategy of forming, using, and burning disposable ties allowed families caught in desperate situations to make it from one day to the next, but it also bred instability and fostered misgivings among peers.
----------------------
Charity as a substitute for reputation: Evidence from an online marketplace
Daniel Elfenbein, Ray Fisman & Brian McManus
Review of Economic Studies, forthcoming
Abstract:
Consumers respond positively to products tied to charity, particularly from sellers that are relatively new and hence have limited alternative means for assuring quality. We establish this result using data from a diverse group of eBay sellers who "experiment" with charity by varying the presence of a donation in a set of otherwise matched product listings. Most of charity's benefits accrue to sellers without extensive eBay histories. Consistent with charity serving as a quality signal, we find fewer customer complaints among charity-intensive sellers.
----------------------
Reciprocity by Proxy: A Novel Influence Strategy for Stimulating Cooperation
Noah Goldstein, Vladas Griskevicius & Robert Cialdini
Administrative Science Quarterly, September 2011, Pages 441-473
Abstract:
We explored a novel reciprocity-based influence strategy to stimulate cooperation called the reciprocity-by-proxy strategy. Unlike in traditional reciprocity, in which benefactors provide direct benefits to target individuals to elicit reciprocity, the reciprocity-by-proxy strategy elicits in the target a sense of indebtedness to benefactors by providing benefits to a valued third party on behalf of the target (e.g., first making a donation to a charity on behalf of one's employees and then later asking employees to comply with a request). We hypothesize that this strategy should be more effective than the widely used incentive-by-proxy strategy, in which one makes a request of a target, promising to provide aid to a valued third party if the target first complies with the request (e.g., offering to make a donation to charity for every employee who complies with a request). We found that hotel guests were more likely to reuse their towels when the hotel's environmental conservation program used a reciprocity-by-proxy strategy than when it used an incentive-by-proxy or standard environmental strategy. Four additional experiments replicate this finding, rule out alternative explanations, and reveal that the reciprocity-by-proxy approach can backfire when the target audience does not support the beneficiary of the aid.
----------------------
Michèlle Bal & Kees van den Bos
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
People are often encouraged to focus on the future and strive for long-term goals. This noted, the authors argue that this future orientation is associated with intolerance of personal uncertainty, as people usually cannot be certain that their efforts will pay off. To be able to tolerate personal uncertainty, people adhere strongly to the belief in a just world, paradoxically resulting in harsher reactions toward innocent victims. In three experiments, the authors show that a future orientation indeed leads to more negative evaluations of an innocent victim (Study 1), enhances intolerance of personal uncertainty (Study 2), and that experiencing personal uncertainty leads to more negative evaluations of a victim (Study 3). So, while a future orientation enables people to strive for long-term goals, it also leads them to be harsher toward innocent victims. One underlying mechanism causing these reactions is intolerance of personal uncertainty, associated with a future orientation.
----------------------
Annemarie Loseman & Kees van den Bos
Social Justice Research, March 2012, Pages 1-13
Abstract:
People have a need to Belief in a Just World (BJW) in which people get what they deserve. When people are confronted with an event which threatens this BJW (e.g. when they witness a girl falling victim to rape), people try to maintain their existing beliefs, for example, by blaming the innocent victim for her ill fate. We argue that this defensive process of blaming innocent victims in essence stems from self-regulatory failure. In accordance with this line of reasoning, our first experiment shows that when self-regulatory resources were depleted (i.e. in the case of high ego-depletion) before BJW threatening information describing an innocent victim of a rape crime, the effect of BJW threat on victim blaming amplified. Study 2 shows that when self-regulation was facilitated by means of self-affirmation after the BJW threatening information, the effect of BJW threat on victim blaming vanished. Taken together, our findings suggest that coping with BJW threats involve self-regulatory processes leading to more or less defensive reactions (like blaming innocent victims). When people's self-regulatory resources are depleted, they react more negatively to innocent victims when they constitute a stronger threat to the BJW. Facilitating self-regulation, by means of self-affirmation, enables people to cope with BJW threatening information, thereby inhibiting the urge to blame innocent victims.
----------------------
How Can Bill and Melinda Gates Increase Other People's Donations to Fund Public Goods?
Dean Karlan & John List
NBER Working Paper, March 2012
Abstract:
We develop a simple theory which formally describes how charities can resolve the information asymmetry problems faced by small donors by working with large donors to generate quality signals. To test the model, we conducted two large-scale natural field experiments. In the first experiment, a charity focusing on poverty reduction solicited donations from prior donors and either announced a matching grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, or made no mention of a match. In the second field experiment, the same charity sent direct mail solicitations to individuals who had not previously donated to the charity, and tested whether naming the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as the matching donor was more effective than not identifying the name of the matching donor. The first experiment demonstrates that the matching grant condition generates more and larger donations relative to no match. The second experiment shows that providing a credible quality signal by identifying the matching donor generates even more and larger donations than not naming the matching donor. Importantly, the treatment effects persist long after the matching period, and the quality signal is quite heterogeneous-the Gates' effect is much larger for prospective donors who had a record of giving to "poverty-oriented" charities. These two pieces of evidence support our model of quality signals as a key mechanism through which matching gifts inspire donors to give.
----------------------
Paul Conway & Johanna Peetz
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
According to the moral licensing literature, moral self-perceptions induce compensatory behavior: People who feel moral act less prosocially than those who feel immoral. Conversely, work on moral identity indicates that moral self-perceptions motivate behavioral consistency: People who feel moral act more prosocially than those who feel less so. In three studies, the authors reconcile these propositions by demonstrating the moderating role of conceptual abstraction. In Study 1, participants who recalled performing recent (concrete) moral or immoral behavior demonstrated compensatory behavior, whereas participants who considered temporally distant (abstract) moral behavior demonstrated behavioral consistency. Study 2 confirmed that this effect was unique to moral self-perceptions. Study 3 manipulated whether participants recalled moral or immoral actions concretely or abstractly, and replicated the moderation pattern with willingness to donate real money to charity. Together, these findings suggest that concrete moral self-perceptions activate self-regulatory behavior, and abstract moral self-perceptions activate identity concerns.
----------------------
Social Identification Structures Effects of Perspective Taking
Mark Tarrant, Raff Calitri & Dale Weston
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Research on perspective taking is generally optimistic about the potential for interventions to improve intergroup perceptions. The current research provides new insight into the conditions that frame the intergroup outcomes of perspective taking. It is shown that the effects of perspective taking are not always positive but, instead, depend upon perspective takers' degree of identification with the in-group. In two experiments we demonstrate that adopting the perspective of an out-group member can have damaging effects on intergroup perceptions for highly identified in-group members. Specifically, compared to less committed members, high identifiers used a greater number of negative traits to describe the out-group following perspective taking. Perspective taking also led high identifiers to judge the out-group less favorably. Understanding the social identity implications of perspective taking is crucial to its effective employment in intergroup relations programs.
----------------------
Social Justice, Genomic Justice and the Veil of Ignorance: Harsanyi Meets Mendel
Samir Okasha
Economics and Philosophy, March 2012, Pages 43-71
Abstract:
John Harsanyi and John Rawls both used the veil of ignorance thought experiment to study the problem of choosing between alternative social arrangements. With his 'impartial observer theorem', Harsanyi tried to show that the veil of ignorance argument leads inevitably to utilitarianism, an argument criticized by Sen, Weymark and others. A quite different use of the veil-of-ignorance concept is found in evolutionary biology. In the cell-division process called meiosis, in which sexually reproducing organisms produce gametes, the chromosome number is halved; when meiosis is fair, each gene has only a fifty percent chance of making it into any gamete. This creates a Mendelian veil of ignorance, which has the effect of aligning the interests of all the genes in an organism. This paper shows how Harsanyi's version of the veil-of-ignorance argument can shed light on Mendelian genetics. There turns out to be an intriguing biological analogue of the impartial observer theorem that is immune from the Sen/Weymark objections to Harsanyi's original.
----------------------
Bart Wilson
American Journal of Economics and Sociology, April 2012, Pages 407-435
Abstract:
This article attempts to clarify our understanding of the everyday use of the word "fair" as we apply it to economic behavior. I first examine the decomposition of fair into its semantic primitives and discuss implications of recent research that indicates that the word is one-to-one untranslatable into any other language, that is, the concept of fair is distinctly Anglo. I also make a Wittgensteinian appeal to context and human sociality as an indispensable tether for what we mean by a fair experience and what we know, epistemologically speaking, about fairness. The principal implication of this is that rules that guide fair behavior are not located in an individual's private utility function but instead reside in the connections that the individual has to his cultural environs.
----------------------
Lara Aknin, Elizabeth Dunn & Michael Norton
Journal of Happiness Studies, April 2012, Pages 347-355
Abstract:
We examine whether a positive feedback loop exists between spending money on others (i.e. prosocial spending) and happiness. Participants recalled a previous purchase made for either themselves or someone else and then reported their happiness. Afterward, participants chose whether to spend a monetary windfall on themselves or someone else. Participants assigned to recall a purchase made for someone else reported feeling significantly happier immediately after this recollection; most importantly, the happier participants felt, the more likely they were to choose to spend a windfall on someone else in the near future. Thus, by providing initial evidence for a positive feedback loop between prosocial spending and well-being, these data offer one potential path to sustainable happiness: prosocial spending increases happiness which in turn encourages prosocial spending.
----------------------
Meghan Meyer et al.
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, forthcoming
Abstract:
Humans observe various peoples' social suffering throughout their lives, but it is unknown whether the same brain mechanisms respond to people we are close to and strangers' social suffering. To address this question, we had participants complete functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while observing a friend and stranger experience social exclusion. Observing a friend's exclusion activated affective pain regions associated with the direct (i.e. firsthand) experience of exclusion (dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) and insula), and this activation correlated with self-reported self-other overlap with the friend. Alternatively, observing a stranger's exclusion activated regions associated with thinking about the traits, mental states, and intentions of others ('mentalizing'; dorsal medial prefrontal cortex (DMPFC), precuneus, and temporal pole). Comparing activation from observing friend's vs. stranger's exclusion showed increased activation in brain regions associated with the firsthand experience of exclusion (dACC and anterior insula) and with thinking about the self (medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC)). Finally, functional connectivity analyses demonstrated that MPFC and affective pain regions activated in concert during empathy for friends, but not strangers. These results suggest empathy for friends' social suffering relies on emotion sharing and self-processing mechanisms, whereas empathy for strangers' social suffering may rely more heavily on mentalizing systems.
----------------------
For love or money? What motivates people to know the minds of others?
Kate Harkness et al.
Cognition & Emotion, April 2012, Pages 541-549
Abstract:
Mood affects social cognition and "theory of mind", such that people in a persistent negative mood (i.e., dysphoria) have enhanced abilities at making subtle judgements about others' mental states. Theorists have argued that this hypersensitivity to subtle social cues may have adaptive significance in terms of solving interpersonal problems and/or minimising social risk. We tested whether increasing the social salience of a theory of mind task would preferentially increase dyspshoric individuals' performance on the task. Forty-four dysphoric and 51 non-dysphoric undergraduate women participated in a theory of mind decoding task following one of three motivational manipulations: (i) social motivation (ii) monetary motivation, or (iii) no motivation. Social motivation was associated with the greatest accuracy of mental state decoding for the dysphoric group, whereas the non-dysphoric group showed the highest accuracy in the monetary motivation condition. These results suggest that dysphoric individuals may be especially, and preferentially, motivated to understand the mental states of others.
----------------------
Hypnotic ingroup-outgroup suggestion influences economic decision-making in an Ultimatum Game
Martin Brüne et al.
Consciousness and Cognition, forthcoming
Abstract:
Studies in economic decision-making have demonstrated that individuals appreciate social values supporting equity and disapprove unfairness when distributing goods between two or more parties. However, this seems to critically depend on psychological mechanisms partly pertaining to the ingroup-outgroup distinction. Little is known as to what extent economic bargaining can be manipulated by means of psychological interventions such has hypnosis. Here we show that a hypnotic ingroup versus outgroup suggestion impacts the tolerance of unfairness in an Ultimatum Game. Specifically, the ingroup suggestion was associated with significantly greater acceptance rates of unfair offers than the outgroup suggestion, whereas hypnosis alone exerted only small effects on unfairness tolerance. These findings indicate that psychological interventions such as hypnotic suggestion can contribute to ingroup favoritism and outgroup rejection.
----------------------
Are Dictators Averse to Inequality?
Oleg Korenok, Edward Millner & Laura Razzolini
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, forthcoming
Abstract:
We present the results of an experiment designed to identify more clearly the motivation underlying dictators' behavior. In the typical dictator game, recipients are given no endowment. We give an endowment to the recipient as well as the dictator. This new dimension allows us to test directly for inequality aversion. Our results confirm that the inequality between dictator's and recipient's endowment is a key determinant of the dictator's giving. As we increase the recipient's endowment from 0 to an amount equal to the dictator's endowment, the mean amount passed drops from 30% to less than 12% of the dictator's endowment, and the proportion of dictators who pass positive amounts falls from 75% to 26%. Thus the majority of dictators exhibit behavior consistent with inequality averse preferences. On the other hand, only 24% of dictators split payoffs equally suggesting that maximin preferences are less important drivers of dictators' giving.
----------------------
When Common Identities Reduce Between-Group Helping
Esther van Leeuwen & Ali Mashuri
Social Psychological and Personality Science, May 2012, Pages 259-265
Abstract:
Emphasizing a common group identity is often suggested as a way to promote between-group helping. But recently, researchers have identified a set of strategic motives for helping other groups, including the desire to present the own group as warm and generous. When the motive for helping is strategic, a salient common identity should reduce the willingness to help another group, because the help no longer communicates a quality of the ingroup (only of the common group). The authors tested this hypothesis in two experiments, in which they assessed beliefs about helping (Study 1) and actual helping through behavioral observation (Study 2). The results fully supported the predictions, demonstrating that a common identity is not a universal tool for the promotion of prosocial behavior. The studies also illustrate the strategic nature of between-group helping, in which acts that appear prosocial on the surface are in fact intended to enhance the ingroup's image.
----------------------
US Public Support for Vaccine Donation to Poorer Countries in the 2009 H1N1 Pandemic
Supriya Kumar et al.
PLoS ONE, March 2012
Background: During the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, the global health community sought to make vaccine available "in developing nations in the same timeframe as developed nations." However, richer nations placed advance orders with manufacturers, leaving poorer nations dependent on the quantity and timing of vaccine donations by manufacturers and rich nations. Knowledge of public support for timely donations could be important to policy makers during the next pandemic. We explored what the United States (US) public believes about vaccine donation by its country to poorer countries.
Methods and Findings: We surveyed 2079 US adults between January 22nd and February 1st 2010 about their beliefs regarding vaccine donation to poorer countries. Income (p = 0.014), objective priority status (p = 0.005), nativity, party affiliation, and political ideology (p<0.001) were significantly related to views on the amount of vaccine to be donated. Though party affiliation and political ideology were related to willingness to donate vaccine (p<0.001), there was bipartisan support for timely donations of 10% of the US vaccine supply so that those "at risk in poorer countries can get the vaccine at the same time" as those at risk in the US.
Conclusions: We suggest that the US and other developed nations would do well to bolster support with education and public discussion on this issue prior to an emerging pandemic when emotional reactions could potentially influence support for donation. We conclude that given our evidence for bipartisan support for timely donations, it may be necessary to design multiple arguments, from utilitarian to moral, to strengthen public and policy makers' support for donations.
----------------------
Neural basis of egalitarian behavior
Christopher Dawes et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, forthcoming
Abstract:
Individuals are willing to sacrifice their own resources to promote equality in groups. These costly choices promote equality and are associated with behavior that supports cooperation in humans, but little is known about the brain processes involved. We use functional MRI to study egalitarian preferences based on behavior observed in the "random income game." In this game, subjects decide whether to pay a cost to alter group members' randomly allocated incomes. We specifically examine whether egalitarian behavior is associated with neural activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and the insular cortex, two regions that have been shown to be related to social preferences. Consistent with previous studies, we find significant activation in both regions; however, only the insular cortex activations are significantly associated with measures of revealed and expressed egalitarian preferences elicited outside the scanner. These results are consistent with the notion that brain mechanisms involved in experiencing the emotional states of others underlie egalitarian behavior in humans.
----------------------
Neural correlates of fair behavior in interpersonal bargaining
Silvia Weiland et al.
Social Neuroscience, forthcoming
Abstract:
Research findings show that proposers make surprisingly fair offers in the ultimatum and dictator games, an observation that contradicts predictions of classical game theory. The present functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study examines brain activities of proposers that contribute to fair and unfair behaviors. We hypothesized that egoistic and altruistic motives of proposers affect fairness differentially in the two games. fMRI analysis revealed that the 28% of fair offers in the present ultimatum game were related to enhanced activity in prefrontal areas, in particular, in regions involved in reward and theory of mind. This corroborates the idea that egoistic motives are primarily responsible for fair offers in this game, which we denote as strategic fairness. Fair offers in the dictator game, however, were related to increased activity in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and the posterior cingulate cortex. This supports the idea that altruistic motives primarily drive fair offers in the dictator game, denoted here as altruistic fairness.
----------------------
What Is It like to Feel Another's Pain?
Frédérique de Vignemont & Pierre Jacob
Philosophy of Science, April 2012, Pages 295-316
Abstract:
We offer an account of empathetic pain that preserves the distinctions among standard pain, contagious pain, empathetic pain, sympathy for pain, and standard pain ascription. Vicarious experiences of both contagious and empathetic pain resemble to some extent experiences of standard pain. But there are also crucial dissimilarities. As neuroscientific results show, standard pain involves a sensorimotor and an affective component. According to our account, contagious pain consists in imagining the former, whereas empathetic pain consists in imagining the latter. We further argue that awareness of another's standard pain is part of empathetic pain, but empathetic awareness of another's standard pain differs from believing that another is in standard pain.
----------------------
Humility: A consistent and robust predictor of generosity
Julie Exline & Peter Hill
Journal of Positive Psychology, May/June 2012, Pages 208-218
Abstract:
Does humility predict generous motives and behaviors? Although earlier studies have suggested a positive connection, it has remained unclear whether another trait might better account for the humility/generosity link. Three studies examined associations between a self-report measure of humility, related traits, and generosity. In Study 1 (197 adults in a community sample), humility predicted greater generosity on two behavioral measures: Charitable donations and mailing back an extra survey. In Study 2 (286 undergraduates), humility predicted giving more money to an anonymous future participant. In Study 3 (217 undergraduates), humility was associated with greater self-reported motives to be kind to others, including benefactors, close others, strangers, and enemies. Across all three studies, the role of humility was not better explained by the Big Five, self-esteem, entitlement, religiosity, gratitude, or social desirability. These studies complement prior work by demonstrating that the link between humility and generosity is both consistent and robust.
----------------------
Does status affect intergroup perceptions of humanity?
Dora Capozza et al.
Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, May 2012, Pages 363-377
Abstract:
Across three studies, we examined whether ingroup status may affect intergroup perceptions of humanity. In Studies 1 and 2, we considered real groups: Northern versus Southern Italians; in Study 3, we manipulated the socioeconomic status of two minimal groups. In all studies, members of higher status groups perceived the ingroup as more human than the outgroup, while members of lower status groups did not assign a privileged human status to the ingroup. Such findings were obtained using different implicit techniques: the Implicit Association Test (IAT) and the Go/No-go Association Task (GNAT). Further, results suggest that the different perceptions of humanity may depend on the stereotypic traits generally ascribed to higher and lower status groups. The implications of results for infrahumanization research are discussed.
----------------------
The roots of modern justice: Cognitive and neural foundations of social norms and their enforcement
Joshua Buckholtz & René Marois
Nature Neuroscience, May 2012, Pages 655-661
Abstract:
Among animals, Homo sapiens is unique in its capacity for widespread cooperation and prosocial behavior among large and genetically heterogeneous groups of individuals. This ultra-sociality figures largely in our success as a species. It is also an enduring evolutionary mystery. There is considerable support for the hypothesis that this facility is a function of our ability to establish, and enforce through sanctions, social norms. Third-party punishment of norm violations ("I punish you because you harmed him") seems especially crucial for the evolutionary stability of cooperation and is the cornerstone of modern systems of criminal justice. In this commentary, we outline some potential cognitive and neural processes that may underlie the ability to learn norms, to follow norms and to enforce norms through third-party punishment. We propose that such processes depend on several domain-general cognitive functions that have been repurposed, through evolution's thrift, to perform these roles.
----------------------
The Effect of Media on Charitable Giving and Volunteering: Evidence from the "Give Five" Campaign
Barış Yörük
Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, forthcoming
Abstract:
Fundraising campaigns advertised via mass media are common. To what extent such campaigns affect charitable behavior is mostly unknown, however. Using giving and volunteering surveys conducted biennially from 1988 to 1996, I investigate the effect of a national fundraising campaign, "Give Five," on charitable giving and volunteering patterns. The widely advertised Give Five campaign was aimed to encourage people to give 5 percent of their income and volunteer 5 hours a week. After controlling for selection into being informed about the Give Five, I find that people who were informed about the campaign increased their weekly volunteering activity on average by almost half an hour, but their giving behavior was not significantly affected. I discuss the policy implications associated with this result and argue that although the Give Five campaign did not achieve its goal, its impact on volunteering was considerable.
----------------------
Asset Legitimacy and Distributive Justice in the Dictator Game: An Experimental Analysis
Luigi Mittone & Matteo Ploner
Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, April 2012, Pages 135-142
Abstract:
Distributive justice seems to guide behavior in reward allocation tasks in which subjects in a group jointly produce an endowment that is then allocated by a member of the group. It has been shown that allocators aim to preserve the proportionality between inputs (e.g., effort) and outputs (e.g., monetary rewards) of those in the group, even when this comes at a cost to themselves. We experimentally investigated whether justice considerations of this kind play a role in a double-blind dictator game when the assets to be allocated are generated exclusively through the effort of the decision maker. The experiment shows that distributive justice is an important source of motivation in highly demanding social environments in which reputational concerns and reciprocity are absent. This finding has been corroborated by an independent validity check and may have important implications for previous experimental findings and for the economics of charity.