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<p>Across 30 sessions involving 162 participants, groups of five strangers confronted a basic form of the volunteer’s dilemma. Participants had 60&#xa0;s to decide whether to keep the offered amount for personal gain or sacrifice it for the group’s benefit, with the reward decreasing by one-fifth every 12&#xa0;s. In three studies, as the cost of altruism increased from 50 TL to 400 TL, and then to 2000 TL (half of the participants’ average monthly income), the proportion of altruists dropped from 40% to 18.5%, and then to 17.5%. The resilience of altruistic sacrifice is explained through a psycho-dynamic model inspired by the observed variation in altruists’ hesitations. According to this model, individuals are not simply influenced by the cost of altruism when deciding whether to act altruistically. They first establish a value hierarchy between themselves and others. If they assume that others are more valuable, they may adopt one of two cognitive attitudes: confident altruists make quick decisions based solely on their value assumption. The remaining individuals, however, seek to validate their assumption by comparing the faced cost against a reasonable cost threshold - derived from high (faced cost) and low anchors (the minimum cost triggering a sense of loss) - and hesitate until the gap narrows. We propose that the resilience of sacrifice has three underlying causes: the difficulty of abandoning the value assumption, the difficulty of abandoning the confident attitude, and an upward bias in hesitant altruists’ reasonable cost thresholds.</p>

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Why are altruists insensitive to rising costs of sacrifice? An experimental study of the volunteer’s dilemma

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2026年5月20日

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  • Mustafa Emre Çağlar,
  • Hüseyin Altundağ

摘要

Across 30 sessions involving 162 participants, groups of five strangers confronted a basic form of the volunteer’s dilemma. Participants had 60 s to decide whether to keep the offered amount for personal gain or sacrifice it for the group’s benefit, with the reward decreasing by one-fifth every 12 s. In three studies, as the cost of altruism increased from 50 TL to 400 TL, and then to 2000 TL (half of the participants’ average monthly income), the proportion of altruists dropped from 40% to 18.5%, and then to 17.5%. The resilience of altruistic sacrifice is explained through a psycho-dynamic model inspired by the observed variation in altruists’ hesitations. According to this model, individuals are not simply influenced by the cost of altruism when deciding whether to act altruistically. They first establish a value hierarchy between themselves and others. If they assume that others are more valuable, they may adopt one of two cognitive attitudes: confident altruists make quick decisions based solely on their value assumption. The remaining individuals, however, seek to validate their assumption by comparing the faced cost against a reasonable cost threshold - derived from high (faced cost) and low anchors (the minimum cost triggering a sense of loss) - and hesitate until the gap narrows. We propose that the resilience of sacrifice has three underlying causes: the difficulty of abandoning the value assumption, the difficulty of abandoning the confident attitude, and an upward bias in hesitant altruists’ reasonable cost thresholds.