Journal
RATIONALITY AND SOCIETY
Volume 22, Issue 3, Pages 353-380Publisher
SAGE PUBLICATIONS LTD
DOI: 10.1177/1043463110366232
Keywords
altruism; in-group bias; noblesse oblige; social status; warm-glow giving
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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.
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