Reason Foundation  Reason Foundation  Why Are People
"Irrationally" Generous to Strangers?  New research finds that
nice guys tend to finish first.  Ronald Bailey July 26, 2011
Here’s a puzzle. Take the dictator game. It's a one-shot two-
player anonymous experimental game. The dictator is given a sum
of money, say, $10. She may keep it all or give some amount to
the responder. Strict economic rationality suggests that the
dictator would choose to keep it all. Evolutionary psychology
concurs: Why give resources to a complete stranger?  It turns
out, however, that many dictators actually give some portion of
the money to the anonymous stranger. Reviewing the literature on
dictator game experiments, the modal amount left by dictators
for responders hovers around 30 percent [PDF]. Why are dictators
generous to someone that they will never meet or interact with
again?     To probe the puzzle of apparent excessive human
generosity to strangers, the researchers ran computer
simulations in which agents interacted wi