When letter writing increases kindness: Regulating emotions or activating pro-social thinking?

Wendelin Schnedler and Nina Lucia Stephan ()
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Nina Lucia Stephan: University of Paderborn

No 29, Working Papers Dissertations from Paderborn University, Faculty of Business Administration and Economics

Abstract: Previous experiments suggest a chain of unkindness: unkindly treated people pass on unkind behavior to an innocent third person. As a remedy, it has been proposed that the unkindly treated person writes a letter to the unkind person. Indeed, unkindly treated subjects who were writing letters have been found to be more kind to an innocent third person than unkindly treated subjects that were not writing letters. As an explanation, it has been suggested that letter writing helps writers to `close the case' and thereby regulate their emotions. We propose an alternative explanation for this behavior: letter writing might activate more pro-social modes of thinking - irrespective of how the letter writer was treated before. Here, we examine how letter writing affects kindly treated subjects and compare this effect to that on unkindly treated subjects using an experiment. We find that letter writing increases giving to an innocent third person in both groups, suggesting that letter writing activates more pro-social modes of thinking.

Keywords: pro-sociality; chain of unkindness; letter writing; experimental economics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 D03 D91 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 20
Date: 2019-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-exp, nep-gth, nep-hpe and nep-neu
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pdn:dispap:29

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