Familial and social proximity and preferences for giving and redistribution: a social discounting experiment

The role of relationships in explaining giving is under-researched in the social discounting corpus. We apply mixed-effect multilevel regression modelling to data from a social discounting experiment to determine how characteristics of benefactor–beneficiary relationships contribute to differences in giving. Beyond the importance of kinship, psychosocial closeness and socio-economic inequality, communication and gender dynamics matter in giving. Our research emphasises that the complexity of the subject–recipient relationship matters in social discounting experiments. Methodologically, experimenters should collect more detailed information on the nature of subject–recipient relationships in the social discounting task. Theoretically, it is necessary to expand the Charitable Triad Theory to include the notions of ‘familial’ and ‘social’ proximity in advancing our understanding of preferences for giving and redistribution. At a pragmatic level, experimenters should be cognisant that the targeted beneficiaries of human altruism are relatively diverse, explaining the heterogeneity observed in the impact of policies and programmes.