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 6
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34As noted above, given the widely replicated result that popular people generally display
prosociality, it is somewhat surprising that little evidence has been gathered on the innate
prosociality of popular people. Prosociality is critical for humans to achieve and maintain
cooperation in large groups of genetic strangers; likewise, it paves the way for large scale
impersonal exchange, which forms the foundation of prosperous human societies. Indeed,
human social interaction is largely shaped by pro-social preferences (Chen & Houser,
2012; Fehr et al., 2008).
Few economic studies investigate the developmental roots of the relationships between
popularity and pro-social behaviors. Studies of non-human primate prosociality often
suggest dominance rank as a mediator of pro-social tendencies (e.g., De Waal & Suchak,
2010; Horner et al., 2011; Proctor et al., 2013). The reason is that, in comparison to those
with low rank, high-ranked primates tend to be more pro-social. Given the evolutionary
connectedness between human and non-human primates, we may expect similar findings
amongst humans, and, in particular, young children. Layous et al. (2012) suggests that
pro-social behaviors boost peer acceptance in children aged 9 to 11 years. LaFontana &
th
th
Cillessen (2002) concluded that 4
to 8
graders indicate liked others as pro-social and
disliked others as antisocial. Similarly, they associated perceived popularity with both
pro-social and antisocial behavior.
A study related to ours was reported by Brañas-Garza et al. (2010). The authors elicited
the social network of a section of undergraduate students and then required them to make
decisions in a standard dictator game (where decisions are anonymous and in private).
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Brañas-Garza et al. (2010) found that more socially integrated
people were more
altruistic toward other participants in the same session. This result, however, may be
capturing a form of indirect reciprocity: the more socially integrated individuals are more
generous since they are more likely to benefit from the generosity of the other
participants in the same session. Different from Brañas-Garza et al. (2010), the generous
behaviors in our experiment do not benefit other individuals participating in the same
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Social integration is measured by the network concepts of “reciprocal degree” and “betweenness
centrality”. See their paper for details.
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