Previous studies of national culture and prosocial behaviors have been limited to Hofstede’s five traditional culture dimensions. We introduce the fairly new and less studied cultural dimension of indulgence versus restraint (IVR) as a predictor of prosocial behaviors. We tested the effect of IVR on prosocial behavior over Hofstede’s previously studied dimensions. We also tested the moderating effect of government effectiveness on the relationship between indulgence and prosocial behavior. We crossed data for cultural dimensions from Hofstede with data from the world-giving index for prosocial behavior and data for government effectiveness from the World Bank. In total, eighty-seven countries entered our model. Indulgence predicted volunteering above the other researched cultural dimensions. It did not predict helping a stranger or donating. Among the cultural dimensions, only uncertainty avoidance was also significant in the prediction of volunteering. Uncertainty avoidance was the only cultural dimension that predicted donating. Individualism was not significant in the prediction of prosocial behaviors. Long-term orientation was the only cultural dimension that predicted helping a stranger (but not volunteering and donating) over other researched cultural dimensions. We found that government effectiveness is a boundary condition to the link between indulgent cultures and two prosocial behaviors (donating and helping a stranger but not for volunteering). Our results indicate that only in countries with high government effectiveness does indulgence predict prosocial behaviors, and not in cultures with low government effectiveness.

While there is apparent evidence that individual philanthropic behavior and the motivations for this behavior are at least to some extent universal, there is also evidence that people across the world do not equally display this behavior. In this conceptual article, I explore how we can study philanthropic behaviors from a global perspective. I contend that the macro-level study of philanthropy is underdeveloped, because of three problems intrinsic to the study of global philanthropy: problems with geographical orientation, connotations and definitions. As a first step to overcome these problems, I suggest the use of the term generosity behavior over philanthropic behavior, as this term appears more inclusive of the multitude of definitions and connotations across cultures. I conclude by formulating a collaborative research agenda for a more inclusive study and understanding of global generosity behavior, focused on generating publicly accessible knowledge and informing policy.

This paper offers a comprehensive and up-to-date analysis of one of the most important expressions of philanthropy in Mexico: giving by individuals. The data we present have been produced using a survey specifically redesigned to collect information on the giving practices of Mexicans, a national survey on giving and volunteering. We offer a brief literature review and then proceed to provide our results on the incidence of money donation and mean annual donation patterns among different segments of the Mexican population, test different variables as determinants of giving and provide the first estimation of the total value of individual money donation for a given year. We also provide findings on in-kind donations and an assessment of the evolution of individual giving to nonprofit organizations.

This paper analyzes if men and women are expected to behave differently regarding altruism. Since the dictator game provides the most suitable design for studying altruism and generosity in the lab setting, we use a modified version to study the beliefs involved in the game. Our results are substantial: men and women are expected to behave differently. Moreover, while women believe that women are more generous, men consider that women are as generous as men.

Reciprocity has been shown to be sensitive to perceived intentions, however, not much is known about the intensity of reciprocal responses to the precise nature of those intentions. For example, a person can strategically appear to be kind while being self-serving or can be selflessly (genuinely) kind. Do these two intentions elicit different reciprocal reactions? We propose a conjecture that self-serving but generous actions diminish the positively reciprocal response, compared to selfless generous actions. We classify actions that increase a recipient’s maximum payoff, but by less than the giver’s maximum payoff, as being self-serving generous actions, while classifying actions that increase a recipient’s maximum payoff by more than the giver’s as selfless generous actions. We hypothesize that selfless generous actions are considered more generous than self-serving generous actions, and that self-serving generous actions will therefore result in a diminished reciprocal response. We test this conjecture using two novel experimental designs. We find some evidence that subjects perceive self-serving generous actions as being less generous than selfless generous actions, but no empirical support for our conjecture on the diminished reciprocal response.

We systematically investigate prisoner’s dilemma and dictator games with valence framing. We find that give versus take frames influence subjects’ behavior and beliefs in the prisoner’s dilemma games but not in the dictator games. We conclude that valence framing has a stronger impact on behavior in strategic interactions, i.e., in the prisoner’s dilemma game, than in allocation tasks without strategic interaction, i.e., in the dictator game.

We introduce a novel way to elicit individuals’ strength of altruistic motivation in the context of charitable donations, ranging from pure warm glow to pure altruism. Using the giving-type elicitation task of Gangadharan et al. (2018) and assuming that individuals maximise a Cobb–Douglas impure altruism utility function, as is used in Ottoni-Wilhelm et al. (2017), we can uniquely identify the strength of altruistic motivation for impure altruists, which is typically found to be the largest category of donors. We compare the introduced measure to an alternative survey-based elicitation from Carpenter (2021).

In recent years there has been a marked escalation in the study of Graeco-Roman associations. Useable data for recreating associational groups usually derive from the inscriptions embedded in stone monuments that have survived in the material record. Because data of this kind usually originate from groups with middling economic resources, it is imperative to focus particular attention on any data emerging from groups lower on the socio-economic scale. The second-century b.c.e. papyrus fragments of SB 3.7182 from Philadelphia in Egypt are a prime resource in this regard, surfacing from what must have been one of the most inconspicuous of associations. This article offers a detailed investigation of the general prosopography of the low-level association comprising a few enslaved men. It proposes that ten meetings are evident in the heavily damaged associational ledgers; that the association consisted of enslaved members of three distinct households; that a subscription or epidosis was collected at one meeting; and that we get a rare glimpse of low-level generosity enacted within the association in relation to the payment of membership fees, as well as an extremely rare glimpse of the agency of the enslaved.

Are religious people more generous than non-religious people? If so, are they more generous in general or mainly to members of their religious ingroup (i.e., parochially generous)? Also, do levels of parochial generosity differ between Christians, Muslims, and atheists? This paper examined these questions by using a novel design of the Dictator Game, where participants in multiple rounds decided how much money to keep for themselves and give to three other players, of whom some information is revealed. Three studies (N = 1,719) with a Swedish sample, an American sample, and a sample from Egypt and Lebanon were conducted. We found that religious people were more generous compared to non-religious people when information about players’ religious affiliation was available, but not when it was not available. The results suggest that if religious people are more generous, this mainly occurs when religious information is salient. We also found evidence of parochial generosity among Christians, Muslims, and atheists as all three groups gave more to their religious ingroup than to both of their outgroups. However, Muslims seemed to differ from Christians and atheists by giving more to their ingroup than the other two groups gave to their respective ingroups in the USA and possibly in Sweden.

Long-term thinking and voluntary resource sharing are two distinctive traits ofhuman nature. Across three experiments (N=1,082), I propose a causal connection:Sometimes people are generous because they think about thefuture. Participants were randomly assigned to either focus on the present orthe future and then made specific decisions in hypothetical scenarios. In Study1 (N=200), future-focused participants shared more money in a public dictatorgame than present-focused participants (+39%), and they were willing to donatemore money to charity (+61%). Study 2 (N=410) replicated the positive effect offuture-focus on dictator giving when the choice was framed as public (+36%), butfound no such effect when the choice was framed as private. That is, focusing onthe future made participants more generous only when others would know theiridentity. Study 3 was a high-powered and pre-registered replication of Study 1(N=472), including a few extensions. Once again, future-focused participantsgave more money to charity in a public donation scenario (+40%), and they weremore likely to volunteer for the same charity (+17%). As predicted, the effectwas mediated by reputational concern, indicating that future-orientation canmake people more generous because it also makes them more attuned to the socialconsequences of their choices. Taken together, the results suggest that focusingon the future promotes reputation-based generosity. Bystimulating voluntary resource sharing, a central function of human foresightmight be to support cooperation in groups and society.

Existing evidence from laboratory experiments finds that a match is likely to increase charitable donations by more than a theoretically equivalent rebate. A number of explanations have been proposed for this in the literature. One idea, which has never been tested, is that people consider a match to be more generous, because unlike the rebate, there is no reward for making a donation in the match setting. We design a survey to determine whether people do consider matches more generous than rebates, and probe the reasons subjects give for their answers. We find that a significant number of people do consider rebates less generous because of the reward associated with donations in such a setting.

We conducted an experimental study on social preferences using dictator games similar to Fehr et al. (2008). Our results show that social preferences differ between subjects who receive low-stakes monetary rewards for their decisions and subjects who consider hypothetical stakes. Our findings indicate that, apart from incentives, gender plays an important role for the categorization of different social preferences.

Cultures differ in many important ways, but one trait appears to be universally valued: prosociality. For one’s reputation, around the world, it pays to be nice to others. However, recent research with American participants finds that evaluations of prosocial actions are asymmetric—relatively selfish actions are evaluated according to the magnitude of selfishness but evaluations of relatively generous actions are less sensitive to magnitude. Extremely generous actions are judged roughly as positively as modestly generous actions, but extremely selfish actions are judged much more negatively than modestly selfish actions (Klein & Epley, 2014). Here we test whether this asymmetry in evaluations of prosociality is culture-specific. Across 7 countries, 1,240 participants evaluated actors giving various amounts of money to a stranger. Along with relatively minor cross-cultural differences in evaluations of generous actions, we find cross-cultural similarities in the asymmetry in evaluations of prosociality. We discuss implications for how reputational inferences can enable the cooperation necessary for successful societies.