Shared Self-Determined Experience and Third-Party Redistribution

Using a three-player dictator-game experiment, we find that similar performance during a shared self-determined experience causes a redistributor to privilege the stakeholder who performed similarly. Sharing a self-determined experience, however, is not, in itself, sufficient to influence redistributive preferences. We generate the shared self-determined experience by varying whether a third-party decision maker and a stakeholder acquire money through an effortful activity or through random selection of a ticket. Our results have implications for how redistributive preferences are affected by perceptions of one’s own self-determination and by social connectedness based on perceived similarities.