Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Giving In Dictator Games: Factors Of Generosity, Margaret Gallagher, Prachi Jain

Honors Thesis

Because perceptions of luck, hard work, and the idea of a “me vs. you” mindset often influence people’s ideas of fairness, it is important to understand these perceptions and how they can affect giving and support for redistributive policies. To better understand the factors that influence people to give or not give to others, I created two modified dictator games to answer the research questions, “How does the generation of initial allocation in a dictator game affect perceptions of deservingness?” and “How does competitive and cooperative priming affect dictator allocation choices between efficiency and inefficiency?” By varying the way the …