A Test of Dual-Process Reasoning in Charitable Giving

Zachary Grossman, Joël van der Weele and Ana Andrijevik

University of California at Santa Barbara, Economics Working Paper Series from Department of Economics, UC Santa Barbara

Abstract: Previous economic experiments on dual-process reasoning in altruistic decisions have yielded inconclusive results. However, these studies do not create a conflict between affective and cognitive motives, resulting in imperfect identification. We interact standard cognitive and affective manipulations in a giving task, and hypothesize that the affective manipulation has stronger effects when we simultaneously put the cognitive system under load. In line with earlier results, we find little evidence for dual-process reasoning in giving. Our independent treatment checks cast doubt on the effectiveness of standard treatment manipulations and show that both cognitive and affective manipulations consistently have opposite effects on the two sexes. We discuss the implications of our findings for economic experiments in this nascent research field.

Keywords: Social and Behavioral Sciences; dual-process reasoning; charitable giving; dictator games; experimental economics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-11-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe and nep-exp
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/4tm617f7.pdf;origin=repeccitec (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cdl:ucsbec:qt4tm617f7

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in University of California at Santa Barbara, Economics Working Paper Series from Department of Economics, UC Santa Barbara Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lisa Schiff ().