The 'Robin Hood' effect that governs social equality

Beijing News.Net
Thursday 12th April, 2007 (ANI)

London, Apr 12 : Society is so determined to "even out" the wealth of the rich, that the poorest of the poor don't mind giving up their paltry earnings if it means a reduction in the coffers of the well off, even if they themselves don't stand to gain anything, a new study has found.

The study, by researchers at the University of California in San Diego led by James Fowler, was based on the results of a series of laboratory games.

As a part of the study, 120 student volunteers were asked to take part in the experiment, with each student playing a game on a computer with various anonymous participants.

The "rich" players were those who were assigned the most 'money' tokens in one particular group, and the "poor" players were the ones who had the least.

Along with indicating how much money they had, the computer screen also displayed the amounts held by three other players.

As a part of the experiment, the volunteers were told that each token they kept would contribute 0.05 dollars towards the money they would be left with at the end of the game. This meant that a volunteer who decided to keep 20 tokens in a round would have a dollar left for himself at the end.

The volunteers were then asked to indicate what they wanted to do with their tokens - keep them, or use their tokens to increase or reduce the sums of the other three players.

The subjects completed five rounds of the game, each time interacting online with three new anonymous players.

The researchers found that society has an innate desire for social equality, with the richest players giving up their tokens to help boost the accounts of the poor players about 30 percent of the time.

"One of the reasons we cooperate may be because we care about equality," the New Scientist quoted Fowler, as saying.

They only used their tokens to make the poorer players even more poor 12 percent of the time.

However, what the researchers also found was that poorer players were willing to give up their money to make sure that there was a dip in the coffers of the richer players, with this happening in 44 percent of the rounds.

What the researchers found interesting was the fact that money was not passed on other players, but was simply discarded, hence making sure that neither poor not rich players profited.

"Behavioural findings such as these extend our knowledge about what motivates our economic and political decisions," said economist Chetan Dave at the University of Texas in Dallas, US.

The study is published in the journal Nature.

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