TY  - RPRT
        AU  - Fehrler, Sebastian
AU  - Przepiorka, Wojtek
        TI  - Charitable Giving as a Signal of Trustworthiness: Disentangling the Signaling Benefits of Altruistic Acts
        PY  - 2013/Jan/
        PB  - Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
        CY  - Bonn
        T2  - IZA Discussion Paper
        IS  - 7148
        UR  - https://www.iza.org/publications/dp7148
        AB  - It has been shown that psychological predispositions to benefit others can motivate human cooperation and the evolution of such social preferences can be explained with kin or multi-level selection models. It has also been shown that cooperation can evolve as a costly signal of an unobservable quality that makes a person more attractive with regard to other types of social interactions. Here we show that if a proportion of individuals with social preferences is maintained in the population through kin or multi-level selection, cooperative acts that are truly altruistic can be a costly signal of social preferences and make altruistic individuals more trustworthy interaction partners in social exchange.
In a computerized laboratory experiment, we test whether altruistic behavior in the form of charitable giving is indeed correlated with trustworthiness and whether a charitable donation increases the observing agents' trust in the donor. Our results support these hypotheses and show that, apart from trust, responses to altruistic acts can have a rewarding or outcome-equalizing purpose. Our findings corroborate that the signaling benefits of altruistic acts that accrue in social exchange can ease the conditions for the evolution of social preferences.
        KW  - trust
KW  - social preferences
KW  - costly signaling
KW  - evolution of cooperation
KW  - altruism
KW  - trustworthiness
        ER  -