Warm glow and the transmission of pro‐socialness across generations

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/jpet.12347
• Date: 01 April 2020
• Author: Ngo Van Long
• Published date: 01 April 2020

Received: 29 September 2017

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Revised: 26 August 2018

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Accepted: 11 November 2018

DOI: 10.1111/jpet.12347

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Warm glow and the transmission of

pro‐socialness across generations

Ngo Van Long

Department of Economics, McGill University,

Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Correspondence

Ngo Van Long, Department of Economics,

McGill University, Montreal, Quebec H3A

0G4, Canada.

Email: ngo.long@mcgill.ca

The transmission of pro‐socialness across generations is

modeled using the warm‐glow approach. The parent genera-

tion seeks to cultivate pro‐social values in their children as this

would improve their material well‐being when they grow up as

cooperative adults. I show that communities endowed with

more productive resources have a stronger incentive to teach

their children social cooperation. Thus, there is a correlation

between a village’s level of material well‐being and villagers’

steady‐state level of pro‐socialness. When the cost of moral

education is directly dependent on the parent generation’s

level of pro‐socialness, the multiplicity of steady states may

emerge. If a community’sinitiallevelofpro‐socialness is high,

the system will reach an interior steady state; in contrast, if

this initial level is low, eventually the level of pro‐socialness will

approach zero in the long run. Thus communities that start

with similar initial levels of pro‐socialness may end up at

drastically different steady states.

KEYWORDS

common property resources, intergenerational transmission of

values, material well‐being, pro‐socialness, warm glow

JEL CLASSIFICATION

D62, D64, H23, H52, Q20

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INTRODUCTION

In a seminal paper, Andreoni (1990) formalized the idea that gift givers care not only about the total amount that

the recipient gets, but also about their own act of giving. This is in contrast to the standard model of gift giving

articulated by Bergstrom, Blume, and Varian (1986), which supposes that agents care only about the outcome, not

about their act per se. An implication of the standard model is the “crowding out”property: If the government raises

J Public Econ Theory. 2020;22:371–387. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/jpet © 2018 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

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lump‐sum taxes from the donors and donates the tax revenue to the recipient, donors will reduce their gifts by the

amount of the tax, and everyone’s welfare will be unchanged. In Andreoni’s conception, gift givers experience a

“warm glow”from the fact that they directly contribute to a cause. In a model with warm glows, the “crowding out”

result of the standard model no longer applies.

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Warm glow is perhaps best interpreted as a metaphor for the concept of self‐image or self‐respect.

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Individuals

try to “do the right thing”not because they want to experience a warm glow; rather, they strive to “do their bit”

being motivated by their reverence for a moral imperative and their wish to confirm that they are moral beings.

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This moral urge constitutes an important mechanism for fostering social cooperation. As Smith (1790/2002) aptly

put it, without the urge to fulfill moral duties, human society would “crumble into nothing.”He wrote (p. 190):

[U]pon the tolerable observance of these duties, depends the very existence of human society, which would crumble into

nothing if mankind were not generally impressed with a reverence for those important rules of conduct.

The purpose of the present paper is to provide an explanation as to why the degree of “reverence for important

rules of conduct”may differ across societies and across generations. I argue that parents realize that moral

education plays an important role in shaping children’s attitudes to social cooperation and that parents have an

interest in collectively deciding on the level of resources to be devoted to the moral education of their offsprings. In

my model, parents care about the material well‐being of their own children. Knowing that the future generation will

be economically better off if children’s moral attitudes are cultivated so that that they grow up as cooperative

adults, parents wisely invest in the collective enterprise of moral education of their children.

The transmission of pro‐socialness across generations is by necessity a collective enterprise. If they were to act

individually, parents would have a strong incentive to teach their children to cheat while others are pro‐social. This

would result in a prisoner’s dilemma outcome. To avoid this, collective action is required. This can take the form of

voting on the community’s budget for moral education (under a direct democracy) or voting for candidates known

for their stand on providing moral education in public schools (in a representative democracy). In modern societies,

a large share of moral education is provided through public schools and public‐minded media where children are

taught to recognize the needs of others and to cooperate.

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In primitive societies, the equivalent of the modern

public school is tribal gathering sessions where elders impart moral values to youngsters by a variety of means,

such as telling stories, organizing morality plays, and so on.

The idea that moral attitudes can be greatly influenced by early childhood education is widely accepted.

Researchers in the field of developmental psychology have explored the underlying mechanisms. For example,

Hoffman (2000, p 11) wrote that “peer pressure compels children to realize that other have claims; cognition

enables them to understand others’perspectives; emphatic distress and guilt motivate them to take others’claims

and perspective into account.”Economists have offered models of parental efforts to shape the preferences of their

offspring (Bisin & Verdier, 2001; Giusta, Hashimzade, & Myles, 2017; Tabellini, 2008).

One would surmise that not all societies have the same degree of interest in promoting social cooperation.

A community’s mode of production certainly plays a role. Indeed, conducting behavioral experiments in

15 primitive societies, Henrich et al. (2001) found that how subjects played games in the labs were related to

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The literature on voluntary contributions to a public goods has many applications, such as mutual insurance pools (Levy‐Garboua, Montmarquette,

Valksmann, & Villeval, 2017) and anonymous contributors (Maldonado & Rodrigues‐Neto, 2016), and has been enriched by the theory of clubs (Wooders,

2012) and by additional considerations such as group structure (Lind, 2017) and public norm enforcement (Buchholz, Falkinger, & Rübbelke, 2014).

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Bénabou and Tirole (2006) provide a theory of pro‐social behavior, combining heterogeneity in altruism and greed with the concern for social reputation

and self‐respect. Elster (2017) makes a distinction between social norms and moral norms. Social norms involve punishments by third parties, whereas

moral norms need not be associated with external punishment.

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Thus, the warm glow I consider in this paper is associated with “sticking to one’s maxim/value”and is to be differentiated from any warm glow that may

arise from “behaving in a charitable way.”I am indebted to an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out.

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For example, many scenes in the TV program “Sesame Street”emphasize the importance of cooperation and empathy. In Canada’s province of Quebec,

primary schools use government‐sponsored textbooks that promote cooperation and acceptance of cultural diversity.

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