The influence of role awareness, empathy induction and trait empathy on dictator game giving

Abstract

We ask how state empathy, trait empathy, and role awareness influence dictator game giving in a monetarily incentivized experiment. We manipulated two factors: role awareness (role certainty vs. role uncertainty) and state empathy induction (no empathy induction vs. empathy induction). Under role uncertainty, participants did not know their role as a dictator or a recipient when making their choices. State empathy was induced by asking the dictators to consider what the recipient would feel when learning about the decision. Each participant was randomly assigned into one of the four conditions, and in each condition, participants were randomly assigned into dictator and receiver roles. The role assignment took place before or after decisions were made, depending on the condition. We also studied the direct influence of trait empathy on dictator game giving as well as its interaction with the experimental manipulations. Trait empathy was measured by the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) and the Questionnaire of Cognitive and Affective Empathy (QCAE) before the experiment. Of our experimental manipulations, role awareness had an effect on dictator game giving; participants donated more under role uncertainty than under role certainty. Instead, we did not observe an effect of state empathy induction. Of trait empathy subscales, only affective empathy was positively associated with dictator game giving. Finally, role awareness did not influence all participants similarly but had a larger impact on those with low scores on trait empathic concern or trait affective empathy. Our results indicate that specific measures to induce altruistic sharing can be effective but their effect may vary depending on certain personal characteristics.

Bleeding-Heart Horror Fans

“…The lack of association between affective empathy and donation amount may seem surprising at first. However, some previous studies have also reported no association between induced empathy and generosity in a dictator game (e.g., Herne et al, 2022;Lönnqvist & Walkowitz, 2019). This suggests that the dictator game may be measuring a slightly different aspect of prosocial behavior than affective empathy, albeit one that does not seem to differ in horror fans.…”

Language-based game theory in the age of artificial intelligence

“…The predictive capacity of various sentiment analysis tools should be examined, dissecting the 'black box' to understand the mechanics of language's influence on decision-making. This will be fundamental for developing and testing a specific utility Schurter & Wilson [56] Dreber et al [55] Kettner & Ceccato [51] Kettner & Waichman [53] Walkowitz [57] Herne et al [58] Capraro & Vanzo [17] Bruttel & Stolley [54] Kuang & Bicchieri [24] Brañas-Garza [52] Antinyan et al [ Forest plot of the meta-analysis of the sentiment associated with altruistic behaviour across the studies. One study [49] gets dropped from the meta-analysis, because GPT-4 estimates the same sentiments in all four conditions, therefore the study-level regression does not estimate the standard error.…”

“…To estimate coefficient and standard error at the study level using a linear regression, we need studies with at least three experimental conditions because a linear regression with two data points returns no standard error since there is only one line that passes through two distinct points. We collected 12 research articles with a total of 61 experimental conditions that satisfy this requirement [17,24,[49][50][51][52][53][54][55][56][57][58].…”

The Influence of Affective Empathy on Online News Belief: The Moderated Mediation of State Empathy and News Type

“…This study directly investigated the impact of different TE components on online news belief, using participants' judgment of news believability as the primary measure. Given that affective empathy rather than cognitive empathy is more relevant to people's behaviors (such as prosocial behavior and moral decision making) [28][29][30], we propose Hypothesis 1: an individual's AE, rather than CE, would be more related to their belief in online news. Specifically, higher scores in AE would be associated with higher belief in online news.…”