Unconditional generosity in humans is a puzzle. One possibility is that individuals benefit from being seen as generous if there is competition for access to partners and if generosity is a costly-and therefore reliable-signal of partner quality [1-3]. The "competitive helping" hypothesis predicts that people will compete to be the most generous, particularly in the presence of attractive poten...

The United States has a mortality disadvantage relative to its political and economic peer group of other rich democracies. Recently it has been suggested that there could be a role for social policy in explaining this disadvantage. In this paper, we test this "social policy hypothesis" by presenting a time-series cross-section analysis from 1970 to 2010 of the association between welfare state...

Motivated by methodological concerns, theoretical considerations, and evidence from previous studies, this paper makes a contribution to conducting dictator-game experiments under resource constraints. Using a holistic and strictly controlled approach, we systematically assess the validity of common cost-saving dictator-game variants. We include five common approaches and compare them to a stan...

People's tendency to be more generous toward identifiable victims than toward unidentifiable or statistical victims is known as the Identifiable Victim Effect. Recent research has called the generality of this effect into question, showing that in cross-national contexts, identifiability mostly affects willingness to help victims of one's own "in-group." Furthermore, in inter-group conflict sit...

The purpose of this paper is to explain variations in the divorce rates across prefectures in Japan over the period 1982 to 2002. This paper examines the various factors which may affect divorce rates including: the effects of the generosity of social welfare; the income of females relative to males; the female employment rate; the vacancy rate; a shift to no-fault divorce, and social stigma. T...