Empathy and Altruism: An Experiment on Dictator Game Giving With and Without the Veil of Ignorance

The influence of empathy levels on dictator game giving is studied in a monetarily incentivized experiment. In the experiment, subjects engage in a dictator game where on participant is a decision maker and another participant a recipient. The decision maker, i.e. dictator, decides how much she allocates money to the recipient. The recipient has no say in the game but has to accept whatever the dictator decides to give her. The dictator is allowed to keep all the money she does not give to the recipient. In our case the amount of money to be allocated was 16 euros. All choices were done anonymously via computers in the University of Turku Decision Making Laboratory. The experiment followed a 2x2 factorial design. Factors were information (full information and veil of ignorance) and empathy priming (priming or not priming), the first meaning whether subjects did or did not know their role as a dictator or recipient when making their choices, and the second whether they were primed to consider the feelings of the recipient when she would learn about the allocation decision. Subjects were randomly assigned into the four treatments. Empathy priming was operationalized by asking subjects to write down their thoughts about the recipients anticipated feelings before making their final decision. In addition to the treatments, we measured subjects’ empathy levels both before taking part to the experiment. Cognitive and emotional empathy was separated in the measure. We anticipated that both empathy priming and veil of ignorance would increase dictator game giving, and further that, those who have high levels of emotional empathy would not be influenced by priming or veil of ignorance. Our results demonstrate that the veil of ignorance had the anticipated effect but priming did not. We have not yet analysed the empathy measures.