Cross-cultural study of kinship premium and social discounting of generosity

Abstract

Social discounting predicts that one’s concern for others decreases with increasing social distance. Cultural dimensions may influence this social behavior. Here, we used a dictator game, in which the participants and real members of their social entourage profited from the partition of the endowments determined by the participant, to compare how Chinese and French university students shared endowments with people at different social distances. We tested two hypotheses based on the concepts of kinship premium and cultural collectivism. Stronger ties between close family members were expected among Chinese. This may predict a larger “kinship premium,” i.e., increased generosity to family members at close social distances, in Chinese relative to French participants. Similarly, because collectivism is thought to be stronger in Asian than western societies, greater generosity at larger social distances might also be expected among Chinese participants. The results showed that Chinese were more generous than French at close social distances but discounted more as social distance increased. This difference between French and Chinese was confined to family members and no significant difference in generosity was observed between French and Chinese for non-family members at any social distance. Our findings evidence a stronger kinship premium among Chinese than French students, and no significant effect of cultural collectivism.

Strengths of social ties modulate brain computations for third-party punishment

“…Social distance is in itself a simple measure of a highly complex construct that combines a multitude of factors including blood kinship, affection and professional relationships, to name but a few. These are very heterogeneously dispersed across different social distances and vary between different cultural groups 51 , 52 . Hence, larger scale studies involving greater numbers of participants will be required to disentangle the contributions of these diverse contributary factors towards tolerance or punishment of anti-social behavior.…”