Abstract

Increasing kindness towards distant others at the global level poses a uniquely difficult challenge. There exist systematic inequities in the distribution of economic resources between countries, yet many people in rich countries remain unaware of how rich they are relative to most of the world’s population. This lack of knowledge about relative privilege may be a key bottleneck to people’s prosociality and kindness toward the global poor. In this project, we propose an intervention to address this: a rank-based nudge that informs people how high their income is relative to the global population. Our earlier work has already demonstrated that a rank-based intervention increased participants’ accuracy in estimating the global income distribution and their willingness to contribute to a global charity, albeit in a raffle-based donation paradigm. Further research is needed, however, to answer fundamental questions about the real-world applicability of the intervention, such as whether the intervention increases real-world charitable donations and pledges, whether the effects persist over time, and whether the intervention can increase kindness and generosity more broadly. The proposed grant will tackle all of these questions.

Field

Psychology, Experimental Psychology, Business

Extramural Partners

University College London, Warwick Business School (Behavioral Science)