Prosociality in variants of the dictator game: Evidence from children in El Salvador

Abstract

We study prosocial behavior among primary school students in El Salvador. In a within-subject lab-in-the-field experiment, we examine the relationship between individual traits, i.e., cognitive skills, non-cognitive skills and violence exposure, and how sensitive children are to the changes in the setting of the dictator game. We propose two different variants of the dictator game: allowing the option to take and starting off with relatively unequal initial endowments. We find that prosocial behavior positively correlates with cognitive skills, while no significant correlation with non-cognitive skills and violence exposure arises. Our results show that children are sensitive to the widening of the choice set, with a significant drop in the amount given when the take option becomes available. Children with lower cognitive skills mainly drive the effect. Lastly, we find that children show a stable willingness to redistribute the final resources despite initial disparities, which is unaffected by the level of cognitive skills, non-cognitive skills, and violence exposure. We conclude that cognitive abilities are not only positively related to prosociality, but also to consistency in prosocial behavior across changes in the choice-set of the dictator game.