Why Awe Makes People More Generous: Utility Theory Can Explain Recent Experiments

Recent psychological experiments show that the feeling of awe increases people’s generosity. In this paper, we show that a usual utilitybased approach to decision making explains this increase. 1 Formulation of the Problem Recent experiment: a brief summary. A recent experiment [13] showed that the feeling of awe increases people’s generosity. Recent experiment: details. To measure a person’s generosity, researchers use a so-called Ultimatum Bargaining Game. In this game, to test a person’s generosity, this person is paired with another person in a simulated situation in which they should share a certain fixed amount of money given to them by the experimenter: • the tested person announces which part of this amount he or she is willing to give to the second person; • if the second person agrees, each of them gets the agreed-on amount; • if the offered part is too small and the second person disagrees, no one gets anything. The generosity is then measured by the amount of money that the tested person is willing to give to his/her companion. The gist of the experiment is that this amount increases when a tested person has a feeling of awe, which is induced: • either by requiring the persons to think about awe-inspiring natural scenes, • or by explicitly showing such scenes prior to testing generosity.