Consistency of Prosocial Behavior and Cognitive Skills: Evidence from Children in El Salvador

We investigate the response to changes in the institutional setting of dictator games within a lab-in-the-field experiment involving primary school students in El Salvador. Students play variants of the dictator game allowing the option to take and starting off relative unequal initial endowments. We exploit within-subject variation and find that children are sensitive to the widening of the choice-set, with a significant drop in the contributions when the take option becomes available. The effect is mainly driven by children with low cognitive skills. Conversely, irrespective of the initial inequality in the endowment and their cognitive skills levels, children converge to a similar split of the final payoff. This is consistent with inequality aversion. The results highlight the heterogeneity in the response to different changes in the institutional setting of dictator games.