IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/plo/pone00/0043294.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Lost Letter Measure of Variation in Altruistic Behaviour in 20 Neighbourhoods

Author

Listed:
  • Jo Holland
  • Antonio S Silva
  • Ruth Mace

Abstract

Altruistic behaviour varies across human populations and this variation is likely to be partly explained by variation in the ecological context of the populations. We hypothesise that area level socio-economic characteristics will determine the levels of altruism found in individuals living in an area and we use a lost letter experiment to measure altruism across 20 neighbourhoods with a wide range of income deprivation scores in London, UK. The results show a strong negative effect of neighbourhood income deprivation on altruistic behaviour, with letters dropped in the poorest neighbourhoods having 91% lower odds of being returned than letters dropped in the wealthiest neighbourhoods. We suggest that measures of altruism are strongly context dependant.

Suggested Citation

  • Jo Holland & Antonio S Silva & Ruth Mace, 2012. "Lost Letter Measure of Variation in Altruistic Behaviour in 20 Neighbourhoods," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 7(8), pages 1-4, August.
  • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0043294
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0043294
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0043294
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0043294&type=printable
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1371/journal.pone.0043294?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Daniel Nettle & Agathe Colléony & Maria Cockerill, 2011. "Variation in Cooperative Behaviour within a Single City," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 6(10), pages 1-8, October.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Voraprapa Nakavachara, 2017. "The Economics of Altruism – The Old, the Rich, the Female," PIER Discussion Papers 62, Puey Ungphakorn Institute for Economic Research.
    2. Stefan C. Schmukle & Martin Korndörfer & Boris Egloff, 2019. "No Evidence that Economic Inequality Moderates the Effect of Income on Generosity," SOEPpapers on Multidisciplinary Panel Data Research 1034, DIW Berlin, The German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP).
    3. Chowdhury, Subhasish M. & Jeon, Joo Young, 2014. "Impure altruism or inequality aversion?: An experimental investigation based on income effects," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 118(C), pages 143-150.
    4. Lorna Zischka & Mark Casson & Marina Della Giusta, 2016. "'Cast your bread upon the waters, for you will find it after many days.' A BHPS study of the interaction between giving and welfare," Economics Discussion Papers em-dp2016-10, Department of Economics, University of Reading.
    5. Yanli Wang & Chao Yang & Yanchi Zhang & Xiaoyong Hu, 2021. "Socioeconomic Status and Prosocial Behavior: The Mediating Roles of Community Identity and Perceived Control," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 18(19), pages 1-11, September.
    6. Gweneth Leigh & Andrew Leigh, 2018. "The Misaddressed Letter Experiment," Applied Economics Letters, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 25(21), pages 1527-1530, December.
    7. Riccardo Pansini & Marco Campennì & Lei Shi, 2020. "Segregating socioeconomic classes leads to an unequal redistribution of wealth," Palgrave Communications, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 6(1), pages 1-10, December.
    8. Lorna Zischka, 2016. "The Interaction between Prosocial (Giving) Behaviours and Social Cohesion," Economics Discussion Papers em-dp2016-07, Department of Economics, University of Reading.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Fehr, Dietmar & Rau, Hannes & Trautmann, Stefan T. & Xu, Yilong, 2020. "Inequality, fairness and social capital," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 129(C).
    2. Jin Zheng & Arthur Schram & Tianle Song, 2023. "Social status and prosocial behavior," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 26(5), pages 1085-1114, November.
    3. N Lettinga & P O Jacquet & J-B André & N Baumand & C Chevallier, 2020. "Environmental adversity is associated with lower investment in collective actions," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 15(7), pages 1-23, July.
    4. Fang, Ximeng & Freyer, Timo & Ho, Chui-Yee & Chen, Zihua & Goette, Lorenz, 2022. "Prosociality predicts individual behavior and collective outcomes in the COVID-19 pandemic," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 308(C).
    5. Francisco J. Areal, 2021. "The Role of Personality Traits, Cooperative Behaviour and Trust in Governments on the Brexit Referendum Outcome," Social Sciences, MDPI, vol. 10(8), pages 1-14, August.
    6. Brañas-Garza, Pablo & Caldentey, Pedro & Espín, Antonio M. & Garcia, Teresa & Hernández, Ana, 2020. "Exposure to economic inequality at the age of 8 enhances prosocial behaviour in adult life," MPRA Paper 100683, University Library of Munich, Germany.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0043294. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: plosone (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.