IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/nas/journl/v117y2020p2858-2863.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Market integration accounts for local variation in generalized altruism in a nationwide lost-letter experiment

Author

Listed:
  • Delia Baldassarri

    (Department of Sociology, New York University, New York, NY 10012; Dondena Centre for Research on Social Dynamics, Bocconi University, Milan 20136, Italy)

Abstract

What explains variation in levels of prosocial behavior across communities? And are members of the ingroup and outgroup treated differently? According to evolutionary theories of generalized altruism, market integration should lead to greater levels of prosociality: Market exchange forces people to interact with unknown others, thus creating the conditions for the extension of prosocial behavior beyond close-knit circles to include outgroup members and strangers. Moving away from the evolutionary focus on cross-cultural variation, this article uses the market-integration hypothesis to explain intracultural variation in levels of prosociality in an advanced society. Taking advantage of an ideal setting, this study reports results from a large-scale, nationwide lost-letter experiment in which 5,980 letters were dispersed in a sample of 188 Italian communities. The study confirms the relevance of market integration in accounting for differences in levels of prosociality: In areas where market exchange is dominant, return rates are high. It also casts a light on the relationship between ingroup and outgroup prosociality: Return rates for both Italian and foreign recipients are the same; they vary together; and ingroup returns are highly predictive of outgroup returns at the community level.

Suggested Citation

  • Delia Baldassarri, 2020. "Market integration accounts for local variation in generalized altruism in a nationwide lost-letter experiment," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 117(6), pages 2858-2863, February.
  • Handle: RePEc:nas:journl:v:117:y:2020:p:2858-2863
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.pnas.org/content/117/6/2761.full
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Stefan Dimitriadis & Rembrand Koning, 2022. "Social Skills Improve Business Performance: Evidence from a Randomized Control Trial with Entrepreneurs in Togo," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 68(12), pages 8635-8657, December.
    2. Kinga Makovi & Anahit Sargsyan & Wendi Li & Jean-François Bonnefon & Talal Rahwan, 2023. "Trust within human-machine collectives depends on the perceived consensus about cooperative norms," Nature Communications, Nature, vol. 14(1), pages 1-12, December.
    3. Boulu-Reshef, Béatrice & Schulhofer-Wohl, Jonah, 2022. "The impact of distance on parochial altruism: An experimental investigation," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 75(C).
    4. Choi, Ginny Seung & Storr, Virgil Henry, 2023. "The morality of markets in theory and empirics," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 216(C), pages 590-607.
    5. Valentina Rotondi & Luigino Bruni & Luca Crivelli & Stefano Mancuso & Paolo Santori, 2022. "In praise of the persona economica: listening to plants for a new economic paradigm," Palgrave Communications, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 9(1), pages 1-6, December.
    6. Jiang, Zhi-Qiang & Wang, Peng & Ma, Jun-Chao & Zhu, Peican & Han, Zhen & Podobnik, Boris & Stanley, H. Eugene & Zhou, Wei-Xing & Alfaro-Bittner, Karin & Boccaletti, Stefano, 2023. "Unraveling the effects of network, direct and indirect reciprocity in online societies," Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, Elsevier, vol. 169(C).
    7. Berggren, Niclas & Bjørnskov, Christian, 2023. "Does globalization suppress social trust?," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 214(C), pages 443-458.

    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:nas:journl:v:117:y:2020:p:2858-2863. 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: Eric Cain (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.pnas.org/ .

    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.