IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/feb/wpaper/2101.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

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

Author

Listed:
  • Christina Fong

    (Department of Social and Decision Sciences, Carnegie Mellon University)

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.

Suggested Citation

  • Christina Fong, 2004. "Empathic Responsiveness: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment on Giving to Welfare Recipients," Working Papers 2101, The Field Experiments Website.
    • Handle: RePEc:feb:wpaper:2101
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://karlan.yale.edu/fieldexperiments/pdf/Fong_Empathic%20Responsiveness.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Hå Holm & Peter Engseld, 2005. "Choosing Bargaining Partners—An Experimental Study on the Impact of Information About Income, Status and Gender," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 8(3), pages 183-216, September.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Fairness; Social Preferences; Redistributive Politics; Empathy; Equity; Attitudinal Measures; Dictator Games; Public Goods Experiments;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D63 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement
    • D64 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Altruism; Philanthropy; Intergenerational Transfers
    • 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

    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:feb:wpaper:2101. 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.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using 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: David Franks (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.fieldexperiments.com .

    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.