Status groups and altruistic behaviour in dictator games

Ulf Liebe and Andreas Tutic
Additional contact information
Ulf Liebe: Universität Leipzig, Germany, liebe@sozio.uni-leipzig.de
Andreas Tutic: Universität Leipzig, Germany

Rationality and Society, 2010, vol. 22, issue 3, 353-380

Abstract: We provide evidence on the effects of social status in the dictator game. With regard to average donations from and to status groups, it turns out that (a) the higher the status of the dictator, the more she donates, and (b) the higher the status of the recipient, the less she receives in donations. Both tendencies are proposed by altruism. On a lower level of aggregation, we find that altruism has the highest proportion of correct predictions among all theoretical concepts under consideration (i.e. altruism, warm-glow giving, in-group bias, noblesse oblige). Surprisingly, there are rarely pure altruists on the individual level. This points at well-known problems of aggregation in social science research and challenges, among others, experimental studies on the in-group bias.

Keywords: altruism; in-group bias; noblesse oblige; social status; warm-glow giving (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1043463110366232 (text/html)

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:sae:ratsoc:v:22:y:2010:i:3:p:353-380

DOI: 10.1177/1043463110366232

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Rationality and Society
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().