Genetic basis for sex differences in pro-social behaviour

Or to put it another way: women are born to be nicer according to this report of research. Yeah, I know, you told us.

Eliciting Social Discount Rates in Argentina

A little known research paradigm pioneered by Argentinean psychologists involves positioning a researcher in the driving seat of a van perched on a train track. The dependent variable is whether or not onlookers risk their life and limb to push the van out of the way of an oncoming train.

link here

Most people will have seen the BBC footage at this stage. I had linked before about the Boston case of a woman being rescued from a gruesome death by onlookers who stopped an incoming train. Today is clearly a more extreme case, with the hero pushing an occupied van out of the way of a train, and jumping out of the way to save himself with milliseconds to spare.

Why economists and women are not nice

Everybody thinks economists are wicked people who would cheerfully send children up chimneys, cut the minimum wage and [horror of horrors] make well-off people pay for their own investments in higher education. Now we have the evidence to prove it.

Why are economics students more selfish than the rest?

1. Elaina Rose (with Yoram Bauman)

A substantial body of research suggests that economists are less generous than other professionals and that economics students are less generous than other students. We address this question using administrative data on donations to social programs by students at the University of Washington. Our data set allows us to track student donations and economics training over time in order to distinguish selection effects from indoctrination effects. We find that economics majors are less likely to donate than other students and that there is an indoctrination effect for non-majors but not for majors. Women majors and non-majors are less likely to contribute than comparable men.
http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:udb:wpaper:uwec-2009-20&r=cbe

Are civil servants different?

There is a huge debate about the public/private sector wage premium and the extent to which the public sector should "take the hit" in adjusting public expenditure. This paper asks whether public servants are different in two important domains:

Public Sector Employees: Risk Averse and Altruistic?

Buurman, Margaretha , Dur, Robert , van den Bossche, Seth

We assess whether public sector employees have a stronger inclination to serve others and are more risk averse than employees in the private sector. A unique feature of our study is that we use revealed rather than stated preferences data. Respondents of a large-scale survey were offered a substantial reward and could choose between a widely redeemable gift certificate, a lottery ticket, or making a donation to a charity. Our analysis shows that public sector employees are significantly less likely to choose the risky option (lottery) and, at the start of their career, significantly more likely to choose the pro-social option (charity). However, when tenure increases, this difference in pro-social inclinations disappears and, later on, even reverses. Our results further suggest that quite a few public sector employees do not contribute to charity because they feel that they already contribute enough to society at work for too little.

http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp4401&r=cbe

Sympathy and similarity: The evolutionary dynamics of cooperation

If we are to cooperate with those who carry our genes how can we do this?
The answer from commentary this week in PNAS is that we need to have a system for tagging people:

"The first to investigate a tag for altruism was W. D. Hamilton (2). He conceived
what he called a supergene, able to produce (i) a distinctive phenotypic
trait, (ii) the faculty to recognize the trait in others, and (iii) the propensity to
direct benefits toward bearers of that trait, even though this entails a fitness cost."

One way to tag genetically related people to cooperate with is to judge how similar a person's face is to your own according to a study last year in 'Evolution and Human Behaviour'.

Linking discounting and cooperation with evolutionary theory

Patience is a virtue: Cooperative people have lower discount rates -'08

Abstract
Reciprocal altruism involves foregoing an immediate benefit for the sake of a greater long-term reward. It follows that individuals who exhibit a stronger preference for future over immediate rewards should be more disposed to engage in reciprocal altruism – in other words, ‘patient’ people should be more cooperative. The present study tested this prediction by investigating whether participants’ contributions in a public-good game correlated with their ‘discount rate’. The hypothesis was supported: patient people are indeed more cooperative. The paper discusses alternative interpretations of this result, and makes some suggestions for future research.

The Scarecrow and the Tinman: The Viscissitudes of Human Sympathy and Caring

There have been several mismatches of late between donations and the conditions and needs of different crises across the globe. The prime example of this being the 9/11 tragedy (Spence, 2006). The authors of this integrative and interesting paper propose a theoretical framework to answer the question- "Why do some victims elicit outpourings of sympathy whilst others do not?" in relation to individual decision-making and public policy.

Loewenstein & Small (2007)