Individuals of high socioeconomic status are altruistic in sharing money but egoistic in sharing time

Abstract

The questions of whether and how socioeconomic status (SES) predicts prosocial behavior have sparked an interest from different disciplines, yet experimental evidence is inconclusive. We embedded two types of dictator games in a web survey with 7772 participants from Germany, Poland, Sweden, and the US. Each participant was asked to split a sum of money and a fixed amount of time between themself and a recipient. While higher-SES individuals are more generous than lower-SES individuals in the money game, they are more egoistic in the time game. In addition, the SES of the recipient matters more in the money game than in the time game. These results point towards the relevancy of a situationally contingent social norm of redistribution in studying the relationship between SES and prosocial behavior.

Distrust as a form of inequality

“…While people occupying lower status positions in the hierarchy may not typically control resources, they may be of help, assumed to be less greedy, or perceived as more cooperative. For one, lower status members may be more willing to share 20 , 21 . Most importantly, lower status members are more likely to be underserved, and our trust in them is more consequential.…”