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

Respect for others’ risk attitudes and the long-run future – Andreas Mogensen (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)

When our choice affects some other person and the outcome is unknown, it has been argued that we should defer to their risk attitude, if known, or else default to use of a risk avoidant risk function. This, in turn, has been claimed to require the use of a risk avoidant risk function when making decisions that primarily affect future people, and to decrease the desirability of efforts to prevent human extinction, owing to the significant risks associated with continued human survival. …

Longtermism in an Infinite World – Christian J. Tarsney (Population Wellbeing Initiative, University of Texas at Austin) and Hayden Wilkinson (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)

The case for longtermism depends on the vast potential scale of the future. But that same vastness also threatens to undermine the case for longtermism: If the future contains infinite value, then many theories of value that support longtermism (e.g., risk-neutral total utilitarianism) seem to imply that no available action is better than any other. And some strategies for avoiding this conclusion (e.g., exponential time discounting) yield views that…

Calibration dilemmas in the ethics of distribution – Jacob M. Nebel (University of Southern California) and H. Orri Stefánsson (Stockholm University and Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study)

This paper presents a new kind of problem in the ethics of distribution. The problem takes the form of several “calibration dilemmas,” in which intuitively reasonable aversion to small-stakes inequalities requires leading theories of distribution to recommend intuitively unreasonable aversion to large-stakes inequalities—e.g., inequalities in which half the population would gain an arbitrarily large quantity of well-being or resources…