Abstract
Social life is regulated by norms of fairness that constrain selfish behavior. While a substantial body of scholarship on prosocial behavior has provided evidence of such norms, large inter- and intra-personal variation in prosocial behavior still needs to be explained. The article identifies two social-structural dimensions along which people's generosity varies systematically: group attachment and social position. We conducted lab-in-the-field experiments involving 2,597 members of producer organizations in rural Uganda. Using different variants of the dictator game, we demonstrate that group attachment positively affects prosocial behavior, and that this effect is not simply the by-product of the degree of proximity between individuals. Second, we show that occupying a formal position in an organization or community leads to greater generosity toward in-group members. Taken together, our findings show that prosocial behavior is not an invariant social trait; rather, it varies according to individuals' relative position in the social structure.
Highlights
Social organization affects prosocial behavior [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]
Social Distance and Group Attachment First, we show that dictator game (DG) contributions increase as the social distance between decider and recipient decreases: on average, participants give a larger share of their endowment to in-group members than to out-group members (‘strangers’)
Results are presented in Table 1: in Model I we report mean differences, whereas in Model II we control for overall levels of altruism, as measured by subjects’ contribution to the stranger
Summary
Social organization affects prosocial behavior [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]. some people are more other-regarding than others, most individuals are neither universally altruistic nor selfish. Varying the identity of the recipient or the conditions of anonymity leads to significant intra-personal variation: individuals do share larger amounts of resources with their kin [10], but are more likely to share resources with friends and acquaintances than with strangers [11,12,13]. Shared identities, such as ethnicity [14,15], religion [16], or political partisanship [17], have been shown to affect individuals’ other-regarding preferences
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