Category Archives: Prosocial behavior

Generosity research offers new insight into how children share

Current consensus among psychologists is that children under about five years of age don’t consider merit when sharing with other children, but Felix Warneken has recently found that children begin to share according to merit as early three years old. … Continue reading

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Wall Street Journal story on generosity research

Pulitzer prize winning Wall Street Journal reporter Kevin Helliker recently did a story about early results from Ariel Knafo’s project, “The Family Cycle of Kindness and Generosity.” Knafo and his group discovered a genetic idiosyncrasy in young children that is … Continue reading

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How cooperation spreads in social networks

In a paper recently published in the PNAS, Sci Gen researchers Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler found that members of social networks are influenced by fellow group members’ contribution behavior in future interactions with others who were not involved in … Continue reading

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What causes parents to transmit generosity?

In October co-Investigator Ye Zhang presented the paper “What Motives Cause Parents to Transmit Generosity?” (co-authored with Mark Ottoni-Wilhelm) at the Conference on the Economics of the Family in Paris.  The conference, hosted by the Institut National d’Etudes démographiques, the … Continue reading

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How good is good enough?

OK… So What Now? is a series of first person investigations into the moral and ethical challenges of leading an examined life. Each episode centers around one dilemma from our modern life, and features interviews with guests who have some … Continue reading

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How one economist began to study generosity

How I got interested in generosity and why I stay interested are two different stories.  I took up economics because I wanted to work on income inequality, thinking that inheritances are an important factor that make inequality bigger.  Surprisingly, Gary … Continue reading

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Challenging the assumptions of conventional economics

I’m an economist who entertains a broad palette of possible tastes and motives in the people I study. Some of these tastes and motives come from psychological, some from sociology, some from linguistics, and some just from approaching the world … Continue reading

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From social problems to social goods

Back when I was in graduate school, I was having trouble picking my dissertation topic. Coming from the typical sociology “social problems” perspective, I could not decide which social problem was important enough to study exclusively. One day I started … Continue reading

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