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Emphatic Responsiveness: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment on Giving to Welfare Recipients

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Author Info
Christina M. Fong
Abstract

This paper reports a surprising finding from an experiment on giving to welfare recipients. The experiment tests how offers of money in n-donor dictator games are affected by 1) donors’ humanitarian and egalitarian values and 2) direct information about the recipients’ work-preferences. People who are self-reported humanitarians and egalitarians have giving that is highly elastic with respect to the apparent worthiness of the recipient. Among high scoring humanitarian-egalitarians, the median offer to a recipient who appeared industrious was $5.00, while the median offer to a recipient who appeared lazy was only $1.00. Among low scoring humanitarian-egalitarians, the median offer was $1.00 in both conditions. I refer to this combination of altruism and equity/reciprocity as empathic responsiveness. This finding can be rationalized by a model of inequity aversion.

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Paper provided by The Field Experiments Website in its series Framed Field Experiments with number 0026.

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Length: 40 pages
Date of creation: 2003
Date of revision:
Handle: RePEc:feb:framed:0026

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Related research
Keywords: Dictator Games; Public Goods Experiments;

Find related papers by JEL classification:
D63 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement
D64 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Altruism
A12 - General Economics and Teaching - - General Economics - - - Relation of Economics to Other Disciplines
A13 - General Economics and Teaching - - General Economics - - - Relation of Economics to Social Values
C90 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments - - - General

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