Deservingness and solidarity: Choosing who should get help among people who beg

A strand of the social policy literature investigates who the general public deems deserving of benefits or other types of assistance from public money. This is based on a deservingness heuristic – the judgmental shortcuts people use to make choices. We apply this to direct solidarity towards people who beg through a discrete choice experiment (DCE), the first study to apply the DCE approach to assess direct solidarity choices towards people in extreme poverty. This method allows for revealing preferences that are otherwise difficult to estimate reliably in non-experimental designs of questionnaire research. We assess passers-by’s criteria when deciding whether to give alms to beggars. We use pairs of digital illustrations of individual beggars depicting a combination of four attributes (gender, ethnicity, disability, and the presence of an infant). Respondents in the public space of Brussels are asked to choose between giving alms to one of the beggars and opting out, which means they do not give at all. Approximately 80% of respondents gain positive marginal utility from giving alms to disabled beggars and beggars with children. Most striking, however, is the ethnic dislike: some 70% of respondents derive a negative utility from giving alms to Roma beggars.