Charitable Giving as a Signal of Trustworthiness: Disentangling the Signaling Benefits of Altruistic Acts

By Sebastian Fehrler, Wojtek Przepiorka. Social Science Research Network, 2013

107 citations recorded by the source corpus.

It has been shown that psychological predispositions to benefit others can motivate human cooperation and the evolution of such social preferences can be explained with kin or multi-level selection models. It has also been shown that cooperation can evolve as a costly signal of an unobservable quality that makes a person more attractive with regard to other types of social interactions. Here we show that if a proportion of individuals with social preferences is maintained in the population through kin or multi-level selection, cooperative acts that are truly altruistic can be a costly signal of social preferences and make altruistic individuals more trustworthy interaction partners in social exchange. In a computerized laboratory experiment, we test whether altruistic behavior in the form of charitable giving is indeed correlated with trustworthiness and whether a charitable donation increases the observing agents' trust in the donor. Our results support these hypotheses and show that, apart from trust, responses to altruistic acts can have a rewarding or outcome-equalizing purpose. Our findings corroborate that the signaling benefits of altruistic acts that accrue in social exchange can ease the conditions for the evolution of social preferences.

Subfields: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/53c99bfc36b810535a9a29f1153f7a9956be4b6d

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In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

In Safety Research

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

Prosocial signaling and cooperation among Martu hunters (2015, background): “While recent work supports the formation of trust for future cooperative partnerships as the main content of the signal (Fehrler & Przepiorka, 2013), there are also cases where generosity appears to operate more as a conspicuous display of quality, meant to enhance the prestige or social dominance…”
Trust: An Integrative Review from a Person–Situation Perspective (2015, unknown): “…Bravo, Castellani, & Squazzoni, 2009; Bohnet & Huck, 2004; Bracht & Feltovich, 2009; Charness, Du, & Yang, 2011; Delgado, Frank, & Phelps, 2005; Fehrler & Przepiorka, 2013; Gambetta & Przepiorka, 2014; Keser, 2003; King-Casas et al., 2005; Manapat & Rand, 2012; Masuda & Nakamura, 2012;…”
Ingroup favoritism in cooperation: a meta-analysis. (2014, background): “…the assumption of the benefits associated with a positive reputation, such as people conditioning their own cooperation on others’ reputation (Fehrler & Przepiorka, 2013; Nowak & Sigmund, 1998, 2005) and people selecting/excluding partners from exchange based on their reputation (Barclay &…”
Statistical physics of human cooperation (2017, background): “Moreover, evidence suggests that trustors showmore trust of trustees who have previously cooperated with others, implicating reputation effects [71,89,90].”
Biological markets and the effects of partner choice on cooperation and friendship (2016, background): “For example, charitable giving is seen as a cue of trustworthiness [15], especially when the giver receives no personal benefits for giving [16].”