Consistency of prosocial behavior and cognitive skills: Evidence from children in El Salvador

Jacopo Bonan, Sergiu Burlacu and Arianna Galliera

No 478, Development Working Papers from Centro Studi Luca d'Agliano, University of Milano

Abstract: We investigate the consistency of prosocial behaviors in response to changes in the in- stitutional setting of a lab-in-the-field experiment involving primary school students in El Salvador. Students play variants of the dictator game allowing the option to take and with relative unequal initial endowments. We exploit within-subject variation and find that children are sensitive to the enlargement of the choice-set, with a significant drop in the offers when the take option becomes available. Higher cognitive skills are systematically associated with higher levels of prosociality and lower sensitivity to changes in the choice set. However they do not correlate with responses to relative unequal initial endowments. Children, irrespective of their cognitive skills levels, care about equality and converge to a similar split of the final payoff, regardless of the initial inequality in the endowment, consistent with inequality aver- sion. The relationship between individual traits in childhood and the degree of consistency of prosocial behaviors appears to vary depending on the type of institutional change in the dictator game.

Keywords: prosocial behavior; preference consistency; choice-set; cognitive skills; inequality aversion; El Salvador (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 D91 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-12-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-neu and nep-soc
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:csl:devewp:478

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