Abstract
In this paper we provide new evidence showing that fair behavior is intuitive to most people. We find a strong association between a short response time and fair behavior in the dictator game. This association is robust to controls that take account of the fact that response time might be affected by the decision-maker’s cognitive ability and swiftness. The experiment was conducted with a large and heterogeneous sample recruited from the general population in Denmark. We find a striking similarity in the association between response time and fair behavior across groups in the society, which suggests that the predisposition to act fairly is a general human trait.
Keywords
Response time Dictator game Experiment FairnessJEL Classification
C90 D03 D60Notes
Acknowledgments
This paper has benefited from comments made by David G. Rand and seminar participants at the NHH Norwegian School of Economics and the University of Copenhagen. We are grateful to the Carlsberg Foundation for providing financial support and to Statistics Denmark for collaboration. The project has also received financial support from the Research Council of Norway (Grant No. 202484) and the Ragnar Söderberg Foundation. We also acknowledge the assistance received from Toke Fosgaard, Eva Gregersen, Lars Gårn Hansen, Nikolaos Korfiatis, Ditte Mørup, Louise Skouby, Anja Skadkær Møller, and Thomas A. Stephens.
Supplementary material
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