Beware Of Popular Kids Bearing Gifts: A Framed Field Experiment - Jignan Chen, Daniel Houser, Natalia Montinari, And Marco Piovesan (Interdisciplinary Center For Economic Science, George Mason University) Page 3
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34I. Introduction
A substantial literature in psychology suggests that there is a strong correlation between
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popularity and generosity: popular people are usually also perceived to be pro-social
(e.g.
Cillessen & Mayeux, 2004; LaFontana & Cillessen, 1999, 2002; Parkhurst & Hopmeyer,
1998; Prinstein & Cillessen, 2003; Rubin et al., 2006; Wright et al., 2012; Xie et al.,
2002). This finding resonates with observations with non-human primates, which also
view higher-ranked individuals as generous with resources (de Waal & Suchak, 2010a;
Horner, Carter, Suchak, & de Waal, 2011). One explanation for this correlation could be
that intrinsically generous people are more likely to become popular. Another possibility
is that popular people do not have a greater preference for prosociality, but rather are
more likely to display generosity in public environments (perhaps due to signaling or
reputation maintenance). To our knowledge, no previously discovered evidence has been
able to distinguish these possibilities. Here, we attempt to fill this gap. This paper reports
experiments that examine the effect of popularity on prosociality (sharing decisions) in
children aged six to twelve in both public and private environments. We find popularity
to have a significant and positive effect on public, but not private, generosity; age appears
to have a significant and positive effect in both public and private contexts; popularity
and age have a significant and positive interaction effect only in public environments.
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Our results help to explain the observation that people behave more generously in public
(see, for example, Andreoni & Petrie, 2004; Hoffman, McCabe et al., 1998). Likewise,
they help to identify those people whose decisions are most influenced by public
decision-making.
We conduct a framed field experiment (Harrison & List, 2004) with children aged 6 to 12
in Italy. We measure their prosociality using a dictator game variant, and then later elicit
the child’s popularity (see Section II for the details regarding the way we construct the
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As anecdotal evidence, some self-help websites indicate that one of the key steps in becoming popular is to
be nice, helpful, and friendly to others, e.g.,
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See for example, Hoffman et al. (1996), where, in a double blind treatment, subjects were significantly
more likely to give zero in a dictator game than in the treatment where experimenters were present; another
example would be Andreoni & Petrie (2004), who showed that increased confidentiality gives rise to
greater generosity in fund-raising.
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