Hyper-altruistic behavior vanishes with high stakes

Pablo Brañas-Garza, Diego Jorrat, Jaromír Kovářík and María C López

PLOS ONE, 2021, vol. 16, issue 8, 1-12

Abstract: Using an incentivized experiment with statistical power, this paper explores the role of stakes in charitable giving of lottery prizes, where subjects commit to donate a fraction of the prize before they learn the outcome of the lottery. We study three stake levels: 5€ (n = 177), 100€ (n = 168), and 1,000€ (n = 171). Although the donations increase in absolute terms as the stakes increase, subjects decrease the donated fraction of the pie. However, people still share roughly 20% of 1,000€, an amount as high as the average monthly salary of people at the age of our subjects. The number of people sharing 50% of the pie is remarkably stable across stakes, but donating the the whole pie–the modal behavior in charity-donation experiments–disappears with stakes. Such hyper-altruistic behavior thus seems to be an artifact of the stakes typically employed in economic and psychological experiments. Our findings point out that sharing with others is a prevalent human feature, but stakes are an important determinant of sharing. Policies promoted via prosocial frames (e.g., stressing the effects of mask-wearing or social distancing on others during the Covid-19 pandemic or environmentally-friendly behaviors on future generations) may thus be miscalibrated if they disregard the stakes at play.

Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0255668 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 55668&type=printable (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:plo:pone00:0255668

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0255668

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().