Empathic Responsiveness: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment on Giving to Welfare Recipients

Christina Fong ()
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Christina Fong: Department of Social and Decision Sciences, Carnegie Mellon University

No 2101, Working Papers from The Field Experiments Website

Abstract: This paper reports a surprising finding from an experiment on giving to welfare recipients. The experiment tests how offers of money in n-donor dictator games are affected by 1) donors' humanitarian and egalitarian values and 2) direct information about the recipients' work-preferences. People who are self-reported humanitarians and egalitarians have giving that is highly elastic with respect to the apparent worthiness of the recipient. Among high scoring humanitarian-egalitarians, the median offer to a recipient who appeared industrious was $5.00, while the median offer to a recipient who appeared lazy was only $1.00. Among low scoring humanitarian-egalitarians, the median offer was $1.00 in both conditions. I refer to this combination of altruism and equity/reciprocity as empathic responsiveness. This finding can be rationalized by a model of inequity aversion.

Keywords: Fairness; Social Preferences; Redistributive Politics; Empathy; Equity; Attitudinal Measures; Dictator Games; Public Goods Experiments (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A12 A13 C90 D63 D64 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 40 pages
Date: 2004-05
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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