Social information, advice and altruistic behavior by underprivileged children: Experimental evidence from Colombia

We conduct a lab-in-the-field experiment to investigate how parents’, teachers’, and peers’ behavior and advice affect children’s altruism in disadvantaged neighborhoods in Colombia. Elementary school children choose how much to help a child-in-need in a real-effort task before and after learning about their parents’, teachers’, or peers’ decisions or receiving their advice. We find that both information and advice from these sources enhance children’s willingness to share. Their sharing increases after observing others’ decisions, except when it is costly to access information about parents’ behavior. However, when children must incur a small cost to observe others’ behavior, their sharing responds substantially more to their teachers’ and peers’ behavior than to their parents’. By contrast, advice from all sources—parents, teachers, peers, and high-status peers—consistently enhances sharing. Our findings highlight the crucial role of children’s social environments and shed light on multiple policy-relevant channels for fostering altruism among underprivileged children. • Impact of parents’, teachers’, and peers’ behavior or advice on poor kids’ altruism • The impact of advice on children’s altruism is positive for all sources • The impact of information depends on its source and cost • Interventions from parents, teachers, and peers are comparable in effectiveness