What’s in a name? Racial identity and altruism in post-apartheid South Africa

A myriad of possibilities suggest themselves here, including the social distance (perceived and actual) between the two individuals (Akerlof, 1997), attitudes about the deservingness of the recipient (Eckel and Grossman, 1996), the extent of inequality aversion on the part of the proposer (Fehr and Schmidt, 1999), as well as ethics and moral codes (Frolich et al, 2001). [...] Yet, behavioural economists are only now beginning to focus attention on the ways in which personal attributes such as race and gender a¤ect outcomes in social exchange, and the majority of experimental work that has been done has focused almost exclusively on studying the e¤ect that the personal characteristics of the proposer, gender in particular, has on the o¤ers made. [...] The only di¤erence between the anonymous treatment and the race treatment was that in the race treatment, proposers were provided with the surname of the recipient they had been paired with, while in the anonymous treatment, the proposer had no information about their partner. [...] By way of contrast, this insider bias appears to be absent in the behaviour of Black proposers in this sample, with median o¤ers in Black- 4Note, however, that the recipients had the same information about the game as the proposers. [...] While socio-economic di¤erences may help explain the di¤erence in magnitude of the o¤ers made by proposers, it is less apparent why it should be the case that these features should also result in di¤erences in o¤ers being made conditional on the race of the recipient.