Impact or Responsibility? Giving Behaviour in a Televised Natural Experiment
利用电视节目数据，比较了捐赠行为中“影响”（捐赠带来的福祉提升）和“责任”（受助者对困境的控制程度）的相对重要性，发现影响的作用约为责任的两倍。
Abstract 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.