Impact or Responsibility? Giving Behaviour in a Televised Natural Experiment

We directly compare the influences of impact and responsibility considerations on giving behaviour. In moral philosophy, utilitarianism emphasizes the importance of the former, whereas theories of equity and desert argue for the importance of the latter. Our data are from a television show where an audience of one hundred people divides ten thousand euros among three candidates who face financial difficulties, and from independent raters who evaluated attributes of the candidates and their predicaments. We find that the well-being benefit of donations (“impact”) outweighs the degree to which the candidate had control over the cause of their situation (“responsibility”). Giving increases more with impact than it decreases with responsibility, and the contribution of impact to the explanatory power of our regression models is approximately twice that of responsibility. Additionally, our analysis shows no evidence of discrimination based on age, gender, or physical attractiveness.