Giving Thanks
Does Higher Income Make You More Altruistic? Evidence from the Holocaust
Mitchell Hoffman
Review of Economics and Statistics, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper considers the decision of Gentiles whether or not to rescue Jews during the Holocaust, a situation of altruistic behavior under life-or-death stakes. I examine the role to which economic factors may have influenced the decision to be a rescuer. Using cross-country data, and detailed individual-level data on rescuers and non-rescuers, I find that (1) Richer countries had many more rescuers than poorer ones, and (2) Within countries, richer people were more likely to be rescuers than poorer people. The individual-level effect of income on being a rescuer remains significant after controlling for ease of rescue variables, such as the number of rooms in one's home, suggesting that the correlation of income and rescue is not solely driven by richer people having more resources for rescue. Given that richer people might be thought to have more to lose by rescuing, the evidence is consistent with the view that altruism increases in income.
--------------------------
Personality Neglect: The Unforeseen Impact of Personal Dispositions on Emotional Life
Jordi Quoidbach & Elizabeth Dunn
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
The present research provides the first evidence that people neglect their own personalities when they envision their future emotional lives. In Study 1, students ignored the impact of their dispositional happiness in predicting how they would feel 2 weeks after receiving grades. Yet dispositional happiness played an important role in shaping actual emotional experiences. Similarly, exhibiting personality neglect, participants in Study 2 overlooked their trait levels of neuroticism and optimism when forecasting their reaction to Barack Obama's election, though these personality dimensions were related to their actual emotional reactions. Because they overlooked the influence of their own dispositions, individuals incorrectly predicted their future feelings. Ironically, as a result of this personality neglect, more optimistic individuals were less likely to see their emotional future in an overly rosy light, whereas more neurotic individuals were more likely to overestimate the pleasure that the future would bring.
--------------------------
Diffusion of entitlement: An inhibitory effect of scarcity on consumption
Daniel Effron & Dale Miller
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Four studies demonstrated that increasing a desirable commodity's scarcity (i.e., decreasing its supply or increasing demand for it) can inhibit people from claiming the commodity for themselves, thereby delaying its consumption. In Study 1, participants were slower to claim a commodity when its supply was limited versus unlimited. In Study 2, participants expressed more disapproval of someone who took the last commodity compared to the second-last commodity. Participants in Study 3 anticipated that increased demand for a commodity would make them less likely to claim it despite wanting it more. Study 4 showed that the more participants there were who could claim a commodity, the longer it went unclaimed. The inhibitory effect of scarcity was mediated by diminished entitlement to the commodity (Study 3), and increasing entitlement reduced the inhibition against taking scarce commodities (Studies 1 and 2). These findings are discussed in the context of individuals' concern with equality.
--------------------------
Robin Hood Under the Hood: Wealth-Based Discrimination in Illicit Customer Help
Francesca Gino & Lamar Pierce
Organization Science, November-December 2010, Pages 1176-1194
Abstract:
This paper investigates whether an employee's perception of customer wealth affects his likelihood of engaging in illegal behavior. We propose that envy and empathy lead employees to discriminate in illicitly helping customers based on customer wealth. We test for this hypothesis in the vehicle emissions testing market, where employees have the opportunity to illegally help customers by passing vehicles that would otherwise fail emissions tests. We find that for a significant number of inspectors, leniency is much higher for those customers with standard vehicles than for those with luxury cars, although a smaller group appears to favor wealthy drivers. We also investigate the psychological mechanisms explaining this wealth-based discriminatory behavior using a laboratory study. Our experiment shows that individuals are more willing to illegally help peers when those peers drive standard rather than luxury cars, and that envy and empathy mediate this effect. Collectively, our results suggest the presence of wealth-based discrimination in employee-customer relations and that envy toward wealthy customers and empathy toward those of similar economic status drive much of this illegal behavior. Implications for both theory and practice are discussed.
--------------------------
Cheating more when the spoils are split
Scott Wiltermuth
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, forthcoming
Abstract:
Four experiments demonstrated that people are more likely to cheat when the benefits of doing so are split with another person, even an anonymous stranger, than when the actor alone captures all of the benefits. In three of the studies, splitting the benefits of over-reporting one's performance on a task made such over-reporting seem less unethical in the eyes of participants. Mitigated perceptions of the immorality of over-reporting performance mediated the relationship between split spoils and increased over-reporting of performance in Study 3. The studies thus showed that people may be more likely to behave dishonestly for their own benefit if they can point to benefiting others as a mitigating factor for their unethical behavior.
--------------------------
Disadvantage and prosocial behavior: The effects of the Wenchuan earthquake
Li-Lin Rao et al.
Evolution and Human Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
The May 12, 2008, Chinese earthquake of 8.0 magnitude on the Richter scale placed residents in devastated areas in a disadvantaged position. We conducted three sequential surveys in both devastated and non-devastated areas to test our hypothesis that residential devastation would evoke more prosocial behavior. As expected, the results revealed that the degree of prosocial behavior increased with an increasing level of residential devastation, but decreased with the passage of time. However, we also found evidence that a catastrophic disaster leaves a long-lasting effect on prosocial behavior. These findings should improve the conceptual understanding of the origin of prosocial behavior.
--------------------------
Andrew Oswald & Stephen Wu
Review of Economics and Statistics, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper uses Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System data to study life satisfaction and mental health across the states of the USA. The analysis draws upon a sample of 1.3 million citizens. Initially we control for people's personal characteristics (though not income). There is no correlation between states' regression-adjusted well-being and their GDP per capita. States like Louisiana and DC have high psychological well-being levels; California and West Virginia have low well-being. When we control for people's incomes, satisfaction with life is lower in richer states - just as compensating-differentials theory would predict. Nevertheless, some puzzles remain.
--------------------------
Dolores Albarracín, Kenji Noguchi & Ira Fischler
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
The syntactic organization of incidentally presented word pairs may affect behavior by providing actors with implicit propositions about how to behave. In Experiment 1, participants who had already played turns of a mixed-motive game were less cooperative after an explicit propositional suggestion that they had been nice in prior turns but were more cooperative after the suggestion that they should be nice in upcoming turns. In three subsequent experiments, implicit priming with the phrase nice act produced greater levels of defection, implying that actors responded to the implicit suggestion that they had been sufficiently nice already. In contrast, act nice produced greater levels of cooperation, implying that actors responded to the implicit suggestion that they should try to be nicer in upcoming turns. These effects occurred outside of awareness and disappeared when the interval between the words was long and when behavior was measured after a delay.
--------------------------
TV Channels, Self-Control and Happiness
Christine Benesch, Bruno Frey & Alois Stutzer
B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy, 2010
Abstract:
Standard economic theory suggests that more choice is usually better. We address this claim and investigate whether people can cope with the increasing number of television programs and watch the amount of TV they find optimal for themselves or whether they are prone to over-consumption. We find that heavy TV viewers do not benefit but instead report lower life satisfaction with access to more TV channels. This finding suggests that an identifiable group of individuals experiences a self-control problem when it comes to TV viewing.
--------------------------
Investigating the genetic basis of altruism: The role of the COMT Val158Met polymorphism
Martin Reuter, Clemens Frenzel, Nora Walter, Sebastian Markett & Christian Montag
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, forthcoming
Abstract:
Findings from twin studies yield heritability estimates of 0.50 for prosocial behaviours like empathy, cooperativeness and altruism. First molecular genetic studies underline the influence of polymorphisms located on genes coding for the receptors of the neuropeptides, oxytocin and vasopressin. However, the proportion of variance explained by these gene loci is rather low indicating that additional genetic variants must be involved. Pharmacological studies show that the dopaminergic system interacts with oxytocin and vasopressin. The present experimental study tests a dopaminergic candidate polymorphism for altruistic behaviour, the functional COMT Val158Met SNP. N = 101 healthy Caucasian subjects participated in the study. Altruism was assessed by the amount of money donated to a poor child in a developing country, after having earned money by participating in two straining computer experiments. Construct validity of the experimental data was given: the highest correlation between the amount of donations and personality was observed for cooperativeness (r = 0.32, P ≤ 0.001). Carriers of at least one Val allele donated about twice as much money as compared with those participants without a Val allele (P = 0.01). Cooperativeness and the Val allele of COMT additively explained 14.6% of the variance in donation behaviour. Results indicate that the Val allele representing strong catabolism of dopamine is related to altruism.
--------------------------
Income, Motivation, and Satisfaction with Life: An Empirical Analysis
Maria del Mar Salinas-Jiménez, Joaquín Artés & Javier Salinas-Jiménez
Journal of Happiness Studies, December 2010, Pages 779-793
Abstract:
This paper focuses on how different types of motivations can condition satisfaction with life, studying whether individual heterogeneity in motivations affects the relationship between income and life satisfaction and whether the relationship between motivation and satisfaction differs for people in different income-groups. Data used in this study comes from the World Values Survey and the focus is placed on the relationship between income, motivation and satisfaction with life. Once variables such as gender, age, religion, health or education are controlled for, we find that different motivations significantly affect individual wellbeing. Moreover, our results suggest that moving from extrinsic to intrinsic motivation leads individuals to enjoy greater satisfaction with life. This is so independent of the level of income, but the role of intrinsic motivation is particularly significant for people in the low-income class. Life satisfaction also increases, within extrinsic motivation, when moving from importance placed on a good income to focusing on security and, within intrinsic motivation, when moving from emphasis placed on social relatedness to an increased feeling of accomplishment. Overall, our results suggest that different goals and intended outcomes condition individual's perceptions of wellbeing, with intrinsic motivations being crucial in attaining greater levels of satisfaction with life.
--------------------------
Which health conditions cause the most unhappiness?
Carol Graham, Lucas Higuera & Eduardo Lora
Health Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper assesses the effects of different health conditions on happiness. Based on new data for Latin America, we examine the effects of different conditions across age, gender, and income cohorts. Anxiety and pain have stronger effects than physical problems, likely because people adapt better to one-time shocks than to constant uncertainty. The negative effects of health conditions are very large when compared with the effects of income on happiness. And, while higher peer income typically elicits envy, better peer health provides positive signals for life and health satisfaction. Health norms vary widely across countries.
--------------------------
What Factors Create a Humanistic Doctor? A Nationwide Survey of Fourth-Year Medical Students
Cheryl Moyer et al.
Academic Medicine, November 2010, Pages 1800-1807
Purpose: The authors sought to develop a conceptual framework of the factors that most influence medical students' development of humanism and to explore students' opinions regarding the role these factors play in developing or inhibiting humanism.
Method: In 2006-2007, the authors conducted 16 focus groups with fourth-year students and first-year residents at four universities to design a conceptual framework. They used the framework to develop a survey, which they administered to fourth-year medical students at 20 U.S. medical schools in 2007-2008.
Results: Data from 80 focus-group participants suggested that the key influences on students' development of humanism were their authentic, unique, and participatory experiences before and during medical school, and the opportunity to process these experiences. Students who completed the survey (N = 1,170) reported that experiences of greatest intensity (e.g., being involved in a case where the patient dies), participatory learning experiences (e.g., volunteer work, international clinical rotations), and positive role models had the greatest effect on their development of humanism, whereas stressful conditions, such as a busy workload or being tired or postcall, inhibited their humanism. Women and students going into primary care placed significantly greater importance on experiences promoting humanism than did men and those not going into primary care. In addition, students with lower debt burdens viewed such experiences as more important than did those with higher debt burdens.
Conclusions: Students viewed a variety of factors as influencing their development of humanism. This research provides a starting point for enhancing curricula to promote humanism.