Altruism in governance: Insights from randomized training for Pakistan's junior ministers

Sultan Mehmood, Shaheen Naseer and Daniel L. Chen

Journal of Development Economics, 2024, vol. 170, issue C

Abstract: Randomizing different schools of thought in training altruism finds that training junior deputy ministers in the utility of empathy renders at least a 0.4 standard deviation increase in altruism. Treated ministers increased their perspective-taking: blood donations doubled, but only when blood banks requested their exact blood type. Perspective-taking in strategic dilemmas improved. Field measures such as orphanage visits and volunteering in impoverished schools also increased, as did their test scores in teamwork assessments in policy scenarios. Overall, our results underscore that the utility of empathy can be a parsimonious foundation for the formation of prosociality, even impacting the behavior of adults in the field.

Keywords: Economics; Soft-skills; Prosociality; Altruism; Policymakers (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D64 D73 J01 J24 M50 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030438782400066X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Altruism in governance: Insights from randomized training for Pakistan's junior ministers (2024)
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:eee:deveco:v:170:y:2024:i:c:s030438782400066x

DOI: 10.1016/j.jdeveco.2024.103317

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Development Economics is currently edited by M. R. Rosenzweig

More articles in Journal of Development Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().