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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
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    File URL: http://karlan.yale.edu/fieldexperiments/pdf/Fong_Empathic%20Responsiveness.pdf
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    Citations

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    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

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