Altruism

We present preliminary results from a small-scale natural field experiment aimed at exploring online social contagion, with an application to charitable giving. We worked in partnership with Heifer International, a non-profit organization aimed at fighting poverty in developing countries, and HelpAttack!, the developer of a Facebook application that facilitates donations to charities while broadcasting such activities to the donors’ Facebook contacts. We ran a series of marketing campaigns, and randomized the broadcasting of users’ pledges, thereby creating exogenous variation in the information that users’ contacts were receiving. Although our campaigns reached as many as about 13 million Facebook users, 6,000 users clicked on the ad and only 18 pledges were made, without any subsequent pledge from these users’ contacts. We offer potential explanations for this finding on the absence of network effects, and outline our plans for future developments of this on-going project.

Source.  

Explaining altruism

Human altruism shaped our evolutionary history and pervades social and political life. There are, however, enormous individual differences in altruism. Some people are almost completely selfish, while others display strong altruism, and the factors behind this heterogeneity are only poorly understood. We examine the neuroanatomical basis of these differences with voxel-based morphometry and show that gray matter (GM) volume in the right temporoparietal junction (TPJ) is strongly associated with both individuals' altruism and the individual-specific conditions under which this brain region is recruited during altruistic decision making. Thus, individual differences in GM volume in TPJ not only translate into individual differences in the general propensity to behave altruistically, but they also create a link between brain structure and brain function by indicating the conditions under which individuals are likely to recruit this region when they face a conflict between altruistic and selfish acts.

That is from Murishima et al (July 2012), published in Neuron. If you think this is fascinating, I am with you. 

Are nurses more altruistic than real state brokers?

This new paper by Jacobsen et al. (Journal of Economic Physiology, October 2011) examines if nurses are more altruistic than real state brokers (although the subjects are students, not practitioners):

We report results from a dictator game experiment with nurse students and real estate broker students as dictators, and Amnesty International as the recipient. Although brokers contributed substantial amounts, nurses contributed significantly more, on average 76 percent of their endowment. In a second part, subjects chose between a certain repetition of the experiment and a 50-50 chance of costly exit. About one third of the brokers and half of the nurses chose the exit option. While generosity was indeed higher among nurses, even when taking exits into account, the difference cannot readily be attributed to different degrees of altruism.

The authors claim that nurses' higher contributions might be due to a higher sense of duty in terms of contribution of their endowment.