Belief in Hard Work and Altruism: Evidence from a Randomized Field Experiment

Sule Alan and Seda Ertac ()
Additional contact information
Seda Ertac: Koc University

No 2017-053, Working Papers from Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Working Group

Abstract: We show that optimistic beliefs regarding the role of effort in success, while leading to success, diminish the individual's sympathy toward the unsuccessful. We generate random variation in the degree of optimism about the productivity of effort via an effective educational intervention. We find that treated children, holding significantly more optimistic beliefs, are no less likely than control to give to unlucky recipients, but significantly less likely to give to those who failed at a real effort task despite an opportunity to build skill. The results highlight possible unintended social effects of effort-focused optimism and have implications for political economy.

Keywords: redistributive preferences; prosocial behavior; altruism; beliefs; fairness; field experiments (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D31 D64 I24 I28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-exp, nep-hrm and nep-soc
Note: IP
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
http://humcap.uchicago.edu/RePEc/hka/wpaper/Alan_E ... rd-work-altruism.pdf First version, 2017 (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:hka:wpaper:2017-053

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Working Group Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jennifer Pachon ().