Actions such as sharing food and cooperating to reach a common goal haveplayed a fundamental role in the evolution of human societies. These goodactions may not maximise the actor's payoff, but they maximise the other'spayoff. Consequently, their existence is puzzling for evolutionary theories.Why should you make an effort to help others, even when no reward seems to beat stake? Indeed, experiments typically show that humans are heterogeneous:some may help others, while others may not. With the aim of favouring theemergence of 'successful cultures', a number of studies has recentlyinvestigated what mechanisms promote the evolution of a particular good action.But still little is known about if and how good actions can spread from personto person. For instance, does being recipient of an altruistic act increaseyour probability of being cooperative with others? Plato's quote, 'Good actionsgive strength to ourselves and inspire good actions in others', suggests thatis possible. We have conducted an experiment on Amazon Mechanical Turk to testthis mechanism using economic games. We have measured willingness to becooperative through a standard Prisoner's dilemma and willingness to actaltruistically using a binary Dictator game. In the baseline treatments, theendowments needed to play were given by the experimenters, as usual; in thecontrol treatments, they came from a good action made by someone else. Acrossfour different comparisons and a total of 572 subjects, we have never found asignificant increase of cooperation or altruism when the endowment came from agood action. We conclude that good actions do not necessarily inspire goodactions in others, at least in the ideal scenario of a lab experiment withanonymous subjects.
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