Abstract
Recent research has highlighted the role of prosocial personality traits—agreeableness and honesty-humility—in egalitarian distributions of wealth in the dictator game. Expanding on these findings, we ran two studies to examine individual differences in two other forms of prosociality—generosity and reciprocity—with respect to two major models of personality, the Big Five and the HEXACO. Participants (combined N = 560) completed a series of economic games in which allocations in the dictator game were compared with those in the generosity game, a non-constant-sum wealth distribution task where proposers with fixed payoffs selected the size of their partner’s payoff (“generosity”). We further examined positive and negative reciprocity by manipulating a partner’s previous move (“reciprocity”). Results showed clear evidence of both generosity and positive reciprocity in social preferences, with allocations to a partner greater in the generosity game than in the dictator game, and greater still when a player had been previously assisted by their partner. There was also a consistent interaction with gender, whereby men were more generous when this was costless and women were more egalitarian overall. Furthermore, these distinct forms of prosociality were differentially predicted by personality traits, in line with the core features of these traits and the theoretical distinctions between them. HEXACO honesty-humility predicted dictator, but not generosity allocations, while traits capturing tendencies toward irritability and anger predicted lower generosity, but not dictator allocations. In contrast, the politeness—but not compassion—aspect of Big Five agreeableness was uniquely and broadly associated with prosociality across all games. These findings support the discriminant validity between related prosocial constructs, and have important implications for understanding the motives and mechanisms taking place within economic games.
Highlights
One of the major themes in the literature on economic games is that humans care about and are motivated by the interests of others
The findings provide clear evidence of inequality aversion, generosity, and positive reciprocity, which we mapped to a framework of distinct prosocial personality traits
This highlighted the unique roles of politeness from the Big Five model, honesty-humility from the HEXACO model, and more tentatively, traits reflecting irritability, anger, and tolerance and forgiveness
Summary
One of the major themes in the literature on economic games is that humans care about and are motivated by the interests of others. A long line of research has documented how basic prosocial personality traits— known as agreeableness and honesty-humility—contribute to experimental and real-world instances of prosociality, including helping, volunteering, charitable giving, and ethical decision making (e.g., Elshaug and Metzer, 2001; Carlo et al, 2005; Penner et al, 2005; Ozer and Benet-Martínez, 2006; Graziano et al, 2007; Ashton and Lee, 2008; Aghababaei et al, 2014) It is not surprising, that the same prosocial traits have begun to emerge as significant predictors of inequality aversion, egalitarianism, and fairness in economic games (Hilbig et al, 2014; Zhao et al, 2016; for a review, see Zhao and Smillie, 2015)
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