Mechanisms supporting human ultra-cooperativeness are very much subject to debate. One psychological feature likely to be relevant is the formation of expectations, particularly about receiving cooperative or generous behavior from others. Without such expectations, social life will be seriously impeded and, in turn, expectations leading to satisfactory interactions can become norms and institu...

Persistent virtue requires commitment to values not easily operationalized in the metrics of cognitive science. Caregivers living in L’Arche communities commit years and decades of their lives to compassion and social justice in caring for unrelated developmentally disabled adults. We examine generosity and fairness among 48 L’Arche caregivers using economic behavioral tasks and life and identi...

Generous behaviour is known to increase happiness, which could thereby motivate generosity. In this study, we use functional magnetic resonance imaging and a public pledge for future generosity to investigate the brain mechanisms that link generous behaviour with increases in happiness. Participants promised to spend money over the next 4 weeks either on others (experimental group) or on themse...

P nowhere in the world is the norm of generosity more pronounced than in Melanesia. Whereas purchase, via either money or barter, tends to be the dominant mode of resource acquisition in much of the world, apart from self-generated production, the generosity norm manifested primarily through gift-giving operates to provide people in most Melanesian societies with many of their resource needs (S...

Empathy is related to a variety of prosocial behaviors, but the brain mechanisms producing the experience of empathy have not been fully characterized. This study investigated whether the experience of empathy raises oxytocin levels and affects subsequent generosity toward strangers. Short video clips of an emotional scene and an unemotional scene were used as stimuli. Participants rated the em...

Do Unemployment Benefits Increase Unemployment? New Evidence on an Old Question We examine the relationship between unemployment benefits and unemployment using Swedish regional data. To estimate the effect of an increase in unemployment insurance (UI) on unemployment we exploit the ceiling on UI benefits. The benefit ceiling, coupled with the fact that there are regional wage differentials, im...

Why do people help strangers when there is a low probability that help will be directly reciprocated or socially rewarded? A possible explanation is that these acts are contagious: those who receive or observe help from a stranger become more likely to help others. We test two mechanisms for the social contagion of generosity among strangers: generalized reciprocity (a recipient of generosity i...

Should the generosity of unemployment benefits and the progressivity of income taxes depend on the presence of business cycles? This paper proposes a tractable model where there is a role for social insurance against uninsurable shocks to income and unemployment, as well as inefficient business cycles driven by aggregate shocks through matching frictions and nominal rigidities. We derive an aug...

The authors present an interdependence theoretical framework and advance the argument that generosity serves the important purpose of communicating trust, which is assumed to be of utmost importance to coping with incidents of negative noise (i.e., when the other every now and then behaves less cooperatively than intended). Using a new social dilemma task (the parcel delivery paradigm), it was ...