Sincere Giving and Shame in a Dictator Game

Our experiment aims at examining the impact of induced shame on altruism in a dictator game context with exit option. Using an Internet design, we collect a large battery of psychological and demographic variables which enables us to investigate dispositional and social characteristics likely to influence subjects’ altruistic behaviour. Using the emotional induction technique, we induce either shameful or neutral emotions to the participants before they play the dictator game. We then measure the evaluation that subjects give of their own emotions, and subsequently observe their altruistic behaviour. We find that imagined shame-induction is able to increase significantly altruistic behaviour. We observe that forty-one percent of participants are willing to choose to exit the game and do not observe any difference in exiting between the two emotion conditions. Our data show that women are significantly more eager to take the exit option than males. Economics students are, to a large extent, more prone to adopt greedy choices patterns than other social sciences students.