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While poverty-focused campaigns such as the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals argue their case in terms of charity, others, including fair trade initiatives, attempt to appeal to people’s sense of justice. But which approach is more persuasive? The Chr. Michelsen Institute recently conducted a social preference experiment among people in rich and poor countries to examine which considerations are most important when people make decisions about giving away money. The findings of the exercise have now been published in a report.

The real effort fairness experiment, as it was called, paired up people in Norway and Germany with people in Uganda and Tanzania over the internet. The participants first completed an assignment for which they were paid and were then given the opportunity to anonymously transfer all or some of this money to other participants. They knew where the person was from and how well he or she had performed in the assignment. In the process, participants made two types of transfers: one to someone from their own country or someone from the alternate country in the same income bracket, and one to someone in one of the two countries from the opposite income bracket. The first transfer sought to examine the extent to which they felt a moral obligation toward their compatriots and their sense of moral cosmopolitanism. The second considered how supportive participants were towards people either worse or better-off than themselves.

Since the rich participants were on average more productive than the poor participants in the course of the assignment, the experiment produced a dilemma which people in rich countries commonly face, namely that of being aware of people’s poverty yet not being convinced that they deserve to be helped if it is at one’s expense. According to the report, this reflects the ‘needs pull’ going in one direction and the ‘entitlement pull’ going in the other.

The experiment revealed that:

• entitlement considerations were crucial in explaining the extent to which rich people were willing to transfer the income they have earned
• needs considerations were also important but only for some rich participants
• both rich and poor participants acted as moral cosmopolitans
• all participants acted selfishly: while rich participants assigned more importance to entitlements rather than needs, poor participants prioritised needs over entitlements
• poor participants acted more fairly towards rich participants than the model had predicted

The report concludes that since it appears that people in rich countries assign more importance to entitlements than needs, development campaigns that are able to cater to their sense of fairness rather than their sympathy stand a greater chance of succeeding.

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