Status groups and altruistic behaviour in dictator games

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, warmglow 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. © The Author(s) 2010.