Is In-kind Kinder than Cash? The Impact of Money vs. Food Aid on Social Emotions and Aid Take-up
Samantha Kassirer, Ata Jami, & Maryam Kouchaki (Northwestern University)
GPI Working Paper No. 12-2024, winner of the Fellowship 2024 Paper Prize and forthcoming in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
There has been widespread endorsement from the academic and philanthropic communities on the new model of giving cash to those in need. Yet the recipient’s perspective has mostly been ignored. The present research explores how food-insecure individuals feel and respond when offered either monetary or food aid from a charity. Our results reveal that individuals are less likely to accept money than food aid from charity because receiving money feels relatively more shameful and relatively less socially positive. Since many experts endorse the relative effectiveness of monetary over in-kind aid, we hope this research encourages scholars and practitioners to examine strategies to remove the shame associated with the take-up of monetary aid from charity.
Other working papers
Altruism in governance: Insights from randomized training – Sultan Mehmood, (New Economic School), Shaheen Naseer (Lahore School of Economics) and Daniel L. Chen (Toulouse School of Economics)
Randomizing different schools of thought in training altruism finds that training junior deputy ministers in the utility of empathy renders at least a 0.4 standard deviation increase in altruism. Treated ministers increased their perspective-taking: blood donations doubled, but only when blood banks requested their exact blood type. Perspective-taking in strategic dilemmas improved. Field measures such as orphanage visits and volunteering in impoverished schools also increased, as did their test scores in teamwork assessments…
Time Bias and Altruism – Leora Urim Sung (University College London)
We are typically near-future biased, being more concerned with our near future than our distant future. This near-future bias can be directed at others too, being more concerned with their near future than their distant future. In this paper, I argue that, because we discount the future in this way, beyond a certain point in time, we morally ought to be more concerned with the present well- being of others than with the well-being of our distant future selves. It follows that we morally ought to sacrifice…
The paralysis argument – William MacAskill, Andreas Mogensen (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University)
Given plausible assumptions about the long-run impact of our everyday actions, we show that standard non-consequentialist constraints on doing harm entail that we should try to do as little as possible in our lives. We call this the Paralysis Argument. After laying out the argument, we consider and respond to…