7. Societal Influences on Preferences Flashcards
What social and economic outcomes does prosociality affect both at an individual and group level?
-Society and group level: provision of public goods, contract enforcement, governmental efficiency, growth, productivity
-individual level: health, life satisfaction, education, wages
What are measures of prosociality?
Altruism
Trust
General and other regarding behaviour
Give a summary of Kosse Et al 2018
Look at the effects of having a mentor in the form of a Bonn uni student on the prosociality of children from low socioeconomic status. They use a mentoring programme in form of randomised control trial, interviews and prosociality measures
What is the criteria for Low SES
-low equivalence income (30% quintile) and/or
-low education: parents aren’t qualified for uni studies and/or
-single parent status
Describe the mentoring system in Kosse Et al 2018
-volunteers mainly uni students meet children once per week, over one year
-1-2-1 informal learning, no focus on achievement
-widening a child’s horizon through social interaction with a new contact/role model
-interactive joint activities such as cooking, going to zoo or park, sports
Describe the set up of interviews in Kosse Et al 2018
-Wave 1 and 2: one hour interviews in central location labs
-Wave 3: interviewer visits family in homes
-yearly interviews, LR perspective
-mothers answer questionnaire
-children do 1-2-1 experiments snd questionnaires with trained interviewer
How is prosociality measured in Kosse Et al 2018
-incentivised experiments (child)
-questionnaire (child)
-questionnaire about child’s behaviour (mother)
How is altruism measured in Kosse Et al 2018?
-children participate in 3 dictator games
1. Dividing 6 stars, receiver: unknown child from the same age group living nearby
2. Dividing 6 stars, receiver: unknown “poor African child”
3. Binary choice, giving up one out of two stars or not, receiver: unknown child from the same age group living nearby
How is trust measured in Kosse Et al 2018?
-Children answer she adapted and validated items from German socio-economic panel.
-“other people have good intentions towards me” etc
How much do you agree with this statement?
1-5 totally disagree to totally agree
How is other regarding behaviour measured in Kosse Et al 2018
-Mothers assess this during children’s every day life using the prosocial scale of the strength and difficulties questionnaire (SDQ).
-Five SDQ items
“Considerate of other people’s feelings”
“Shares readily with other children”
“Helpful if someone is hurt or upset”
“Kind to younger children”
“Often volunteers to help others”
Rated on a 7 point scale
Whet 3 things is there descriptive evidence of in Kosse Et al 2018
High vs low SES
Prosociality of mothers
Intensity of social interaction
Results of Kosse Et al 2018
-when controlling for social interaction and prosociality of mothers, high SES isn’t statistically significant in deterring prosociality of children.
-social interaction and prosociality of mother are significant at 5% level
-treatment low SES outperforms control high SES in prosociality and all individual facets
-when mother is in too tertile of prosociality, then the treatment has no significant effect
-in 2 year follow up, treatment still outperforms low SES control but not high SES
Advantages and disadvantages of focusing on one society
+Causal analysis is feasible
-no big picture possible
-issue of generalisability
Advantages and disadvantages of cross societal perspective
+Big picture is possible
-causality is harder to establish
How do we measure the rule violation in a society?
-Run experiments in 23 countries, 2568 subjects are students, mean age 21
-use country level indicators
Perception of corruption
Shadow economy
Quality of politics
-perform a principal component analysis to extract the common underlying correlation
