Social Distance, Cooperation and Other-regarding Preferences: A New Approach Based on the Theory of Relational Goods

The last few years have witnessed a dramatic growth of experimental and behavioral economics research on deviations from purely selfish behavior. Several new theoretical models have been developed, which are based on a more complex view of economic agents’ motivations. At the empirical level, many studies have been focused on the context-dependent nature of other-regarding behavior. From a socio-economic point of view, particularly interesting is the experimental evidence on the relation between the reduction of the social distance among the subjects and the probability of observing deviation from purely selfish choices. Social distance has been manipulated by introducing impersonal communication (Frohlich and Oppenheimer 1998), face toface interaction (Bohnet and Frey 1999b; Rankin 2006), silent identification (Bohnet and Frey 1999a, 1999b; Scharlemann et al. 2001), information about personal characteristics (Bohnet and Frey 1999b; Charness et al. 2007) and by varying the degree of anonymity (Hoffman et al. 1996) between subjects.1 What emerges from these studies is a positive and significant correlation between the reduction of social distance and the frequency of non-selfish and cooperative choices. Two explanations have been offered to account for this evidence. According to some authors, the reduction of the social distance promotes the emergence of a feeling of empathy among subjects, which results in higher levels of cooperation (Bohnet and Frey 1999a).