Altruism and Self Control

We extend the dual-self model to include altruistic preferences. This lets us explain (1) why people appear to have preferences for equality in the laboratory, while not giving much to obviously poorer individuals in the eld, (2) why they often avoid the ask from solicitors or charities when they would have donated if avoiding was impossible, (3) why cognitive load and (4) time pressure may increase giving, and (5) why intermediate (rather than just zero or even-split) donations may occur in dictator game experiments. In addition, we (6) point out that the dual-self model predicts that delaying payments to both parties in the dictator game decreases giving. We verify this prediction in a large-scale online experiment: people give less when making decisions for the future compared to when payo s occur on the day of the experiment. This version: November 21, 2014. First Version: January 19, 2014. We thank Syed Nageeb Ali, Gary Charness, Tom Cunningham, Jon de Quidt, Gautam Rao, Josh Schwartzstein, Charlie Spenger, Jeremey Tobacman and Leeat Yariv for helpful conversations and comments. We are grateful to NSF Grants SES-08-51315 and 1258665, as well as the Jan Wallander and Tom Hedelius Foundation (Svenska Handelbankens Forskningsstiftelser), the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, and the John Templeton Foundation for nancial support. ∗Corresponding author: David K. Levine Department of Economics, Stockholm School of Economics Department of Economics, Harvard University Department of Economics, European University Institute and Washington University in St. Louis Department of Psychology, Department of Economics, and School of Management, Yale University Preprint submitted to Mimeo: WUSTL November 21, 2014

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