Higher socioeconomic status does not predict decreased prosocial behavior in a field experiment

Abstract

Does higher socioeconomic status predict decreased prosocial behavior? Methodological issues such as the reliance of survey studies on self-reported measures of prosociality, the insufficient control of relative incentives in experiments, and the use of non-random samples, have prevented researchers from ruling out that there is a negative association between socioeconomic status (SES) and prosociality. Here, we present results from a field experiment on the willingness of unaware individuals of different SES to undertake an effortful prosocial task—returning a misdelivered letter. Specifically, using the rental or sale value of homes as indicators of SES, we randomly selected households of high and low SES and misdelivered envelopes to them. Despite controlling for numerous covariates and performing a series of ancillary tests, we fail to find any evidence that higher SES predicts decreased prosocial behavior. Instead, we find that misdelivered letters are substantially more likely to be returned from high rather than low SES households.

Social Status Differences in Altruism, Fairness and Retaliatory Defection in an Unequal Country

“…We found a moderating effect of unequal economic rank on the relationship between objective status and altruism, but contrary to what could be expected from previous studies (Côté et al, 2015;Piff & Robinson, 2017), our results showed that higher objective status participants were, on average, more altruistic when they enjoyed higher economic status -but we did not find this moderating effect when considering the subjective status participants. Thus, our results align with what has been documented in more recent studies (Hermanni & Tutić, 2019) and corroborate experimental research that has found similar results in both WEIRD (Andreoni et al, 2021;Clerke et al, 2018) and non-WEIRD (Salgado et al, 2019) samples: those who have less are not more altruist than those who have more. Cultural factors could explain why higher objective-SES individuals behave more altruistically when enjoying a slight economic advantage.…”

“…Recent research has cast doubts on the negative relationship between social status and prosociality, with some studies concluding that there is no clear link (Dubois et al, 2015;Trautmann et al, 2013) or even a positive relationship between the two (Andreoni et al, 2021;Bauer et al, 2014;Korndörfer et al, 2015;Tutić & Liebe, 2020). Due to these conflicting results, some researchers have proposed that inequality moderates the association between social status and prosociality (Piff & Robinson, 2017).…”

The Association between Economic Inequality and Adolescents' Prosocial Behavior: Evidence from Brain Potentials and Genes

“…Prosocial behavior refers to the actions undertaken to benefit other people (Yang et al, 2021). While initial researches demonstrated a negative relation between SES and prosocial behaviors, subsequent studies did not corroborate these findings (Andreoni et al, 2021;Trautmann et al, 2013). In a similar vein, several works suggested null relation between SES and prosociality (Côté et al, 2015;Dubois et al, 2015).…”

Socioeconomic Status and Prosocial Behavior: The Mediating Roles of Community Identity and Perceived Control

“…Numerous empirical studies also support this result. For example, Andreoni, Nikiforakis, and Stoop [ 14 ] found that the poor were less likely to return misdelivered envelopes, even if it was not good for them to keep them. A series of studies conducted by Korndörfer et al [ 13 ] also found that people with lower status spent a lower percentage of their income on philanthropy and were less likely to make charitable donations than those with higher status.…”