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, warm-glow 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.

Empirical research has provided mixed evidence regarding the question of whether higher social class promotes prosocial behavior. Recently, Côté et al. [ 1 ] hypothesized that these conflicting evidences might result from a hitherto neglected interaction between the individual’s level of income and the degree of inequality in one’s society. They argue that societies with a higher level of inequality foster a sense of entitlement in high-income individuals, which in turn leads them to be less generous. We put this reasoning to a large-scale test using observational data from the European Social Survey (ESS) and push the scope of our investigation towards a broader conception of social class, using next to income two additional measures of class. First, we examine whether high-class individuals in societies with high levels of inequality do in fact feel more entitled than their counterparts in more equal societies. While we find that an individual’s class and the disposition towards entitlement are strongly correlated, our results show a negative interaction with inequality, i.e. the effect of class on the personal sense of entitlement is weaker in societies with high levels of inequality. Second, we test whether the effect of class on prosocial behavior is moderated by economic inequality with respect to two real-life acts of prosocial behavior, namely engaging in volunteer work and donating money to a humanitarian organization. Our results indicate a substantial positive effect of class on prosocial behavior throughout, as well as a moderate, yet positive, interaction effect of class and inequality.

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Teil durch problematische Maße für sozialen Status und das experimentelle Design bedingt sind. Schlüsselwörter Altruismus • Experiment • Diktatorspiel • Prosozialität • Sozioökonomischer Status • In-group BiasSocial status and prosocial behavior: a quasi-experiment in the hospital Abstract Sociological, social psychological and economic research on the nexus between socioeconomic status and prosociality has so far provided contradictory findings. Some studies suggest that actors with a high socioeconomic status act more egoistically than actors with a lower socioeconomic status. Other studies find the opposite to be true. In contrast to previous research, which has worked with one-dimensional measures for socioeconomic status, this study examines prosocial behavior among occupational groups that have regular real-life contact in their workspace. About 150 hospital employees (physicians, nursing staff and nursing students) participated in experiments on altruistic giving in dictator games. The findings are surprisingly strong and clear-cut: Actors with higher social status act more prosocial than low-status actors. Furthermore, we find hardly any in-group effects, which have been repeatedly postulated. Our findings support the claim that high status promotes prosocial behavior. Also, they indicate that the inconclusive and in part contradictory findings provided by previous research stem to a considerable degree from deficient measures of social status and problematic experimental designs.

We present an extension of the classic rational choice model for educational decisions that is able to explain recent empirical findings by Gabay-Egozi et al. who established that Israeli students from disadvantaged social strata tend to hedge long-term utility with short-term risk when choosing among subjects for their matriculation exams. Adding to that, we show that the assumption of relative risk aversion as formulated in the Breen-Goldthorpe Model can be relaxed to a significant degree without losing its explanatory power regarding the persistence of class differentials in educational choices. This fact casts considerable doubt on the measurement of relative risk aversion in empirical research on the Breen-Goldthorpe Model and hence on the interpretation of the results of such studies.