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Emphatic responsiveness: Evidence from a randomized experiment on giving to welfare recipients

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  • Christina 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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  • Christina Fong, 2003. "Emphatic responsiveness: Evidence from a randomized experiment on giving to welfare recipients," Framed Field Experiments 00149, The Field Experiments Website.
    • Handle: RePEc:feb:framed:00149
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    Cited by:

    1. Tammi, Timo, 2013. "Dictator game giving and norms of redistribution: Does giving in the dictator game parallel with the supporting of income redistribution in the field?," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 43(C), pages 44-48.
    2. Rousu, Matthew C. & Baublitz, Sara J., 2011. "Does perceived unfairness affect charitable giving? Evidence from the dictator game," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 40(4), pages 364-367, August.

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