Social Status, Stakes and Prosocial Behavior Toward Strangers. A Field Experiment with Lost Wallets

A large proportion of the population behaves less selfish than implied by the classical figure of a homo oeconomicus. Prosocial and altruistic behavior is observed in dictator-, ultimatum-, voluntary contribution- and other strategic games. It is also measured by incentivized decision tests like the slider measure of social value orientation. However, findings from lab experiments with student populations are questionable concerning the external validity. Here, we will present findings from a field experiment with apparently lost wallets on prosocial behavior. We are interested in the degree of compliance with a social norm of cooperation in a city and we focus on several factors potentially having an impact on prosocial behavior. Particularly, we focus on status effects and discrimination by variations of the occupation and the name (Muslim versus typical Swiss name on the business card contained in lost wallets). Moreover, we assume that prosociality increases with an empathy stimulus, and when the opportunity cost of norm compliance are relatively low. To explore our hypotheses we conducted a field experiment in the city of Zurich with 223 lost wallets containing up to 108 Swiss Francs (about 100 €). Although the degree of honesty was surprisingly high there were also large and significant differences between treatments.