We report on a two-stage experiment in which i) we first elicit the social network within a section of undergraduate students and ii) we then measure their altruistic attitudes by means of a standard Dictator game. We observe that more socially integrated subjects are also more altruistic, as betweenness centrality and reciprocal degree are positively correlated with the level of giving, even after controlling for framing and social distance, which have been shown to significantly affect giving in previous studies. Our findings suggest that social distance and social integration are complementary determinants of altruistic behavior

We study how cognitive abilities correlate with behavioral choices by collecting evidence from almost 1200 subjects across eight experimental projects concerning a wide variety of tasks, including some classic risk and social preference elicitation protocols. The Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) has been administered to all our experimental subjects, which makes our dataset one of the largest in the literature. We partition our subject pool into three groups depending on their CRT performance. Reflective subjects are those answering at least two of the three CRT questions correctly. Impulsive subjects are those who are unable to suppress the instinctive impulse to follow the intuitive – although incorrect – answer in at least two 2 questions. The remaining subjects form a residual group. We find that females score significantly less than males in the CRT and that, in their wrong answers, impulsive ones are observed more frequently. The 2D:4D ratio, which is higher for females, is correlated negatively with subjects’ CRT score. We also find that differences in risk attitudes across CRT groups crucially depend on the elicitation task. Finally, impulsive subjects have higher social (inequity-averse) concerns, while reflective subjects are more likely to satisfy basic consistency requirements in lottery choices.Financial support from the Spanish Ministries of Education and Science and Economics and Competitiveness (SEJ 2007-62656, ECO2011-29230, ECO2012-34928 and ECO2013-43119), Universidad de Alicante (GRE 13–04), MIUR (PRIN 20103S5RN3_002), Generalitat Valenciana (Research Projects Gruposo3/086 and PROMETEO/2013/037) and Instituto Valenciano de Investigaciones Económicas (IVIE) is gratefully acknowledged

This paper reports a three-phase experiment on a stylized labor market. In the first two phases, agents face simple games, which we use to estimate subjects' social and reciprocity concerns. In the last phase, four principals compete by offering agents a contract from a fixed menu. Then, agents “choose to work” for a principal by selecting one of the available contracts. We find that (i) (heterogeneous) social preferences are significant determinants of choices, (ii) for both principals and agents, strategic uncertainty aversion is a stronger determinant of choices than fairness, and (iii) agents display a marked propensity to work for principals with similar distributional concerns. (JEL D82, D86, J41)

This paper provides experimental evidence on the relationship between social preferences and cognitive abilities, which we measure using the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT). We elicit social preferences by way of 24 dictatorial situations, in which the Dictator’s choice sets include i) standard Dictator games, where increasing the Dictator’s payoff yields a loss for the Recipient, ii) efficient Dicator games, where increasing the Dictator’s payoff also increases that the Recipient’s; as well as other situations in which iii) either the Dictator’s or iv) the Recipient’s monetary payoff is held constant. We partition our subject pool in three groups: reflective (scoring 2 or more in the CRT), impulsive (opting twice or more for the “intuitive” but wrong answers in the CRT) and the remainder. We find that impulsive Dictators show a marked inequity aversion attitude, especially in standard Dictator Games. By contrast, reflective Dictators show lower distributional concerns, except for the situations in which the Dictators’ payoff is held constant. In this case, reflective Dictators give significantly more.