CeDEx Seminar - Dennie Van Dolder (University of Essex)

Impact or Responsibility? Giving Behavior in a Televised Natural Experiment

We directly compare the influences of impact and responsibility considerations on giving behavior. In moral philosophy, utilitarianism emphasizes the importance of the former, whereas theories of equity and desert argue for the importance of the latter. Our data are from a television show where an audience of one hundred people divides ten thousand euros among three financially distressed candidates, and from independent raters who evaluated various attributes of the candidates and their financial predicaments. We find that the well-being benefit of a donation (“impact”) outweighs the degree to which the candidate had control over the cause of their situation (“responsibility”). Giving increases more with impact than it decreases with responsibility, and the contribution of impact to the fit of our regression models is approximately two-and-a-half times that of responsibility. Additionally, our analysis shows no evidence of discrimination on age, gender, or physical attractiveness.