Social preferences depend on emotional states like compassion and anger. Since emotions are fleeting and subject to manipulation, they may generate demand for commitment. We investigate the use of commitment strategies in an online experiment (n = 1,400), where subjects decide to watch or avoid videos before engaging in a charitable giving task. We find that a video with emotional content increases giving, but is also avoided more than non-emotional videos. We estimate a structural model of state-dependent social preferences, and show evidence for sophisticated commitment to selfishness and altruism. We argue that giving can be fruitfully analyzed as a self-control problem.

Previous literature has shown that people are often reluctant to learn whether individually profitable actions have negative consequences for others. In an experimental allocation decision, we vary the ‘inconvenience’ of becoming informed about the payoffs of another player by changing the costs and benefits of choosing the fair outcome. Lowering the cost of fairness turns out to have a multiplier effect, raising both altruistic choices of informed subjects and the fraction of subjects that chooses to become informed. Thus, in situations of uncertainty, subsidizing altruistic choices to decision makers is an effective tool for raising social welfare. By contrast, variations in the size of recipients’ potential benefit have a smaller and insignificant effect on ignorance and fair choices.