People who think of themselves as humanitarians are even more likely than others to
base their donations to the poor on whether they believe poverty is a result of bad luck
or bad choices. That is the central finding of research by Dr Christina Fong of
Carnegie Mellon University, published in the July 2007 issue of the Economic Journal.
Her study supports previous findings that people are more likely to give money to the
poor when they believe that poverty is a result of misfortune rather than laziness.
What’s surprising is that this effect is largest among people who claim to have more
humanitarian or egalitarian beliefs. In fact, humanitarians give no more than others
when recipients are deemed to be poor because of laziness.
Dr Fong comments:
‘These findings imply that people may be more likely to support policies and
charities that help insure people against bad luck rather than their own choices.’
‘For instance, transfer payments to people with prior work histories tend to be
relatively popular as do expenditures on health and education for poor children,
who are too young to be held personally accountable for their poverty.’
Dr Fong conducted an experiment in which subjects were given $10 and asked to
decide how much, if any, to give to a real-life welfare recipient. A few days prior to the
experiment, participants completed surveys about their values and beliefs, including
beliefs about whether lack of effort or bad luck cause poverty. The survey also included
questions designed to measure whether participants considered themselves to be
humanitarians.
During the experiment, donors were randomly matched with three different welfare
recipients with varying work histories and desires for full-time work. This information,
combined with the participants’ individual beliefs about the causes of poverty, had a
major impact on giving: people who believed that their recipient was poor because of
bad luck gave six and a half times as much as people who believed that the recipient
was poor because of laziness.
Those who scored high on the humanitarian measure gave more money to recipients
judged to be victims of bad luck than those who scored low – but the two groups made
the same offers to welfare recipients judged to be lazy. Dr Fong terms this desire to
help people on the condition that they appear to deserve it ‘empathetic
responsiveness’. She explains:
‘This concept blends two well-known concepts of empathy. The first is the idea
that empathy is an emotion that can evoke altruistic behaviour. The second is
the idea that empathy is the ability to attend and respond to another being.’
‘Empathy in this sense may result not only in positive responses to another
person, such as sympathy followed by helping behaviour, but also in negative
responses such as anger followed by revenge.’
The results of this study are significant because altruistic behaviour is not well
explained by traditional economics, which assumes that self-interest is the prime
motivator for human behaviour. Along with prior findings from social survey data and
experiments, they help economists develop more realistic models of human behaviour
so that they can better explain how societies deal with poverty and inequality.
ENDS
Notes for editors: ‘Evidence from an Experiment on Charity to Welfare Recipients:
Reciprocity, Altruism and the Empathic Responsiveness Hypothesis’ by Christina Fong
is published in the July 2007 issue of the Economic Journal.
Christina Fong is a research scientist in the Department of Social and Decision
Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University.
For further information: contact Christina Fong on +1-412-268-8168 (email:
fong2@andrew.cmu.edu; website: http://www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu/usr/fong2); or
Romesh Vaitilingam on 07768-661095 (email: romesh@compuserve.com).