Dataset Information

Inequality and redistribution behavior in a give-or-take game.

ABSTRACT: Political polarization and extremism are widely thought to be driven by the surge in economic inequality in many countries around the world. Understanding why inequality persists depends on knowing the causal effect of inequality on individual behavior. We study how inequality affects redistribution behavior in a randomized "give-or-take" experiment that created equality, advantageous inequality, or disadvantageous inequality between two individuals before offering one of them the opportunity to either take from or give to the other. We estimate the causal effect of inequality in representative samples of German and American citizens (n = 4,966) and establish two main findings. First, individuals imperfectly equalize payoffs: On average, respondents transfer 12% of the available endowments to realize more equal wealth distributions. This means that respondents tolerate a considerable degree of inequality even in a setting in which there are no costs to redistribution. Second, redistribution behavior in response to disadvantageous and advantageous inequality is largely asymmetric: Individuals who take from those who are richer do not also tend to give to those who are poorer, and individuals who give to those who are poorer do not tend to take from those who are richer. These behavioral redistribution types correlate in meaningful ways with support for heavy taxes on the rich and the provision of welfare benefits for the poor. Consequently, it seems difficult to construct a majority coalition willing to back the type of government interventions needed to counter rising inequality.

SUBMITTER: Bechtel MM

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5889654 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

Inequality and redistribution behavior in a give-or-take game.

Bechtel Michael M MM Liesch Roman R Scheve Kenneth F KF

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 20180319 14

Political polarization and extremism are widely thought to be driven by the surge in economic inequality in many countries around the world. Understanding why inequality persists depends on knowing the causal effect of inequality on individual behavior. We study how inequality affects redistribution behavior in a randomized "give-or-take" experiment that created equality, advantageous inequality, or disadvantageous inequality between two individuals before offering one of them the opportunity to ...[more]

PMID: 29555734

Similar Datasets

Project description:In the prevention and resolution of conflicts in social contexts, an important step is to understand how different emotions and empathic traits are linked to punishment behaviors. Unfortunately, few paradigms exist to study these phenomena. Here, we developed the Inequality Game (IG) as an economic and verbal interaction paradigm in which participants are faced with an "unfair other" as opposed to a "fair other" and subsequently have the opportunity to engage in a range of social behaviors. These social behaviors include cooperative or competitive economic choices and nice or derogatory verbal behavior toward the unfair and fair other. Participants could thus engage in punishment or forgiveness behavior toward the unfair other as well as in cooperative or aggressive behavior toward the fair other. We validated the IG through multimodal measures comprising the assessment of personality traits, emotions (by means of facial expressions and self-reports), arousal (by means of skin conductance responses), physical effort (force exertion), and behavioral reactions. Second, we examined the influence of emotions and empathy-related traits on punishment behavior. With regard to emotions, we observed a positive relation between malicious joy and punishment behavior. This result highlights the role of reward-related mechanisms in favoring punishment behavior. In addition, different empathic traits had opposing effects on antisocial behavior. Whereas personal distress predicted aggressive verbal behavior, perspective taking and empathic concern predicted a reduction in punishment behavior. Empathic traits also modulated emotional experience and person evaluations, such that perspective taking was related to more positive affect (less frowning and more smiling) and a more favorable evaluation of the unfair other. The current data validate the IG, reveal that malicious joy is positively related to punishment behavior, and show that different types of empathic traits can have opposing effects on antisocial behavior as well as on related emotions and person evaluations.

Dataset Information

Inequality and redistribution behavior in a give-or-take game.

Publications

Inequality and redistribution behavior in a give-or-take game.

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets