The Science of Generosity: Causes, Manifestations, and Consequences [1st ed. 2020] 978-3-030-26499-4, 978-3-030-26500-7

This book advances understanding of the manifestations, causes, and consequences of generosity. Synthesizing the finding

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The Science of Generosity: Causes, Manifestations, and Consequences [1st ed. 2020]
 978-3-030-26499-4, 978-3-030-26500-7

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xix
Introduction: The Science of Generosity: From Disparate to Integrated (Patricia Snell Herzog)....Pages 1-20
The Manifestations of Generosity: From Cooperation to Social Justice (Patricia Snell Herzog)....Pages 21-51
The Causes of Generosity: From Attachment to Cultural Solidarity (Patricia Snell Herzog)....Pages 53-92
The Consequences of Generosity: From the Interpersonal to the Collective (Patricia Snell Herzog)....Pages 93-108
The Interdisciplinary Study of Generosity: The Sum Is Greater Than Its Parts (Patricia Snell Herzog)....Pages 109-144
Conclusion: Generosity in Action—Benefiting the Collective Good (Patricia Snell Herzog)....Pages 145-159
Appendix: On Studying Generosity (Patricia Snell Herzog)....Pages 161-186
Back Matter ....Pages 187-197

Citation preview

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN ALTRUISM, MORALITY, AND SOCIAL SOLIDARITY

The Science of Generosity

Causes, Manifestations, and Consequences

Patricia Snell Herzog

Palgrave Studies in Altruism, Morality, and Social Solidarity Series Editors Peter Callero Department of Sociology Western Oregon University Salem, OR, USA Matthew Lee Department of Sociology University of Akron Harvard, OH, USA Jane A. Piliavin University of Wisconsin–Madison Madison, WI, USA

The series, as its name implies, focuses on altruism, morality, and social solidarity and their interrelationships. These phenomena were of major concern in the founding and early years of sociology. Renewed interest in their study has occurred in recent years, not only in sociology but also in related disciplines such as psychology, economics, and philosophy. An awareness of the interdependence of these phenomena is also developing, and this series will expand on this while linking the phenomena to important topical issues and developing their implications for the public discourse and public good. Early, foundational scholarship in this area was grounded largely in the writings of sociologists Emile Durkheim, Jane Addams, and Pitirim A. Sorokin, whose work provides a comprehensive and powerful intellectual foundation for future theories and empirical studies. Contributions to the series will build on the mentioned foundational thinkers and will make use of a range of theoretical approaches, including symbolic interactionism, conflict theory, rational choice theory, personalism, Marxist theory, systems theory, and identity theory. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15784

Patricia Snell Herzog

The Science of Generosity Causes, Manifestations, and Consequences

Patricia Snell Herzog Indianapolis, IN, USA

Palgrave Studies in Altruism, Morality, and Social Solidarity ISBN 978-3-030-26499-4    ISBN 978-3-030-26500-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26500-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Estersinhache fotografía / Moment / Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments and Preface

I am enormously grateful for the role of Christian Smith in helping to form the research that led to this book. Chris and I had a fortuitous meeting over coffee, as he was about to hop on an early morning plane back to North Carolina, and as I had just moved back to South Bend, Indiana, to be present for my younger sister’s last years of high school. Having just completed by Master of Social Work degree, I was primed and ready to be a nonprofit executive director, while waiting to eventually answer the call to return to graduate school in sociology. I knew I needed to heed that call, but I wanted to gain more real-world practitioner experience in the interim. The year was 2006, and Chris had just been hired to direct the newly reviving Center for the Study of Religion and Society in the Department of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame. Chris had arranged an unusual situation to remain primarily located in North Carolina, as he concluded his research obligations at the University of North Carolina and also migrated his family north. “I need someone to run the center while I am away,” Chris told me over coffee. I asked myself: “Help run a nonprofit entity, within my home discipline of sociology?” It was a dream come true. Together, Chris and I found ways to blend my interest in community, nonprofits, and youth with his interests in religion and youth. Our first collaborative project was on a book called Passing the Plate: Why American Christians Don’t Give Away More, which he and Michael Emerson were co-authoring. I began my integration into the congregational world by traveling around the country conducting most of the in-depth qualitative interviews that informed that book and co-authored the fourth chapter, v

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into which I coined some of my first sociological terms: comfortable guilt, on the part of American religious givers (explaining why they were comfortable not giving as much as they themselves thought that they should) and “live the vision” versus “pay the bills,” describing different approaches that pastors and priests took to talking about charitable giving within their congregations. Chris and Michael invited my input on other chapters too. That book established the foundation upon which we built many more projects, including a planning grant with the John Templeton Foundation in Spring 2007. In that planning grant, I had the opportunity to create a database of all the scholars around the world who were interested in studying topics related to generosity, forming the same keyword searching that later informed this book. We also collaborated with several established and emerging scholars to write literature reviews that also contributed early learnings to this book. Most notably, I learned a great deal in that planning grant from Pamala Wiepking and René Bekkers (2007), who were both at the time in the Department of Philanthropic Studies at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands (Pamala has since joined the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, where I am also now a faculty member; I am thus incredibly fortunate to be in-house colleagues with Pamala these days.). Back in the planning stages for the Science of Generosity Initiative, Pamala and René wrote a literature review on individual motivations for giving, which has since been published as a two-part series and been cited hundreds of times. It is one of the most informative publications on the topic. I also benefited in that planning grant from the expertise of Jessica Collett, who was at the time a professor at the University of Notre Dame (she is now faculty at the University of California, Los Angeles), and who led graduate student Chris Morrissey in writing a second literature review (2007) on the social psychology of generosity. Brandon Vaidyanathan and I also began the first of many collaborations on that project, and Brandon (2008) wrote a literature review on corporate philanthropy that informed another layer of organizational generosity understanding. Fourth, Ryan Lincoln, Chris Morrissey, and Peter Mundey (2008) also wrote a literature review on religious giving. Brandon, Ryan, Chris, and Peter were all graduate students at Notre Dame. While Assistant Director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Society at the University of Notre Dame, I also had the opportunity to work with and supervise many phenomenal graduate and undergraduate students. I owe tremendous gratitude to these students for their concerted

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efforts in collecting data and providing early thoughts on insights garnered from these data. Notably, I acknowledge the important contributions of graduate students Hillary Davidson, Carlos Tavares, Kari Christoffersen, Brandon Vaidyanathan, Peter Mundey, Ryan Lincoln, Christopher Morrissey, and Lisa Swartz. David Hartman was also an important conversation partner. Additionally, I benefited tremendously from the combined efforts of undergraduate students Nick Bloom, Katie Spencer, Scott Mitchell, Robbee Wedow, Kaitlyn Conway, Molly Kiernan, Jessica Technow, Marie Sanchez, Josh Cool, Chris Gonzales, Scott Hurley, Molly Kring, Michelle Saucedo, Michael Thompson, Allison VanderBroeck, Janice James, Jennifer Jesse, and Caitlin Smith. Their energy and enthusiasm fueled my own engagement. With the learning from that planning grant, Chris and I then co-­ authored the grant for the Science of Generosity Initiative with Kraig Beyerlein, Jessica Collett, and Stephen Vaisey. Kraig was at the time an assistant professor in the School of Sociology at the University of Arizona, my undergraduate alma matter, where at that time Mark Chaves was the department head (Kraig is now Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame and Director of the Center for the Study of Religion). Steve was at the time an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley (Steve is now Professor of Sociology and the Director of Graduate Studies at Duke University). Together, we were awarded in 2008 a $5 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation to fund the Science of Generosity Initiative, which is the basis of this book. In the spring of 2008, we began forming the board of advisors for the project and constructed the request for proposals, which we disseminated in the summer of 2008 to all the scholars we had identified in the planning grant database. In the fall of 2008, we invited several established and emerging scholars to serve as judges, first on the letters of inquiry and later on the full proposals. This rigorous process resulted in a short list of potential projects to fund. In 2009, we hosted an in-person meeting of the board of advisors and project staff to review all these proposals and select the first round of grant awardees. In 2010, we began our own data collection at the University of Notre Dame, including a national survey with in-depth interviews. A second round of dissertation proposals was invited and awarded in 2010, and analyses ensued on all the funded projects, continuing into 2011. In 2012–2013, the 13 funded projects completed data collection and ­preliminary analysis, culminating in an in-person conference of all awardees in the fall of 2012.

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Incidentally, in those few short years, I birthed my first-born in 2010 and my second-born in 2012. Thanks to the loving and compassionate generosity of my mother, who traveled with me to Pittsburg in the fall of 2012, I was able to be part of that conference, attending talks in-between nursing my three-month-old daughter, as we mom-academics do. My husband and I also defended our dissertations within two weeks of each other at the University of Notre Dame in the summer of 2011, and moved our growing family to Houston, Texas to accept postdoctoral fellow positions at Rice University. It was in Houston that we birthed our second-­ born, shortly before the Science of Generosity conference. While a postdoctoral fellow at Rice University, I had the pleasure of working more directly with Michael Emerson (Michael was at the time a professor in the Department of Sociology at Rice University, as well as Co-Director of the Kinder Institute for Urban Research; he is now the Provost of North Park University in Chicago, Illinois). At Rice, I also met one of my dearest friends and fellow collaborators, Jared Peifer (Jared was at the time also a postdoctoral fellow at Rice University; he is now Assistant Professor of Management in the Zicklin School of Business at Baruch College in the City University of New York). Elaine Howard Ecklund, at Rice, was also formative in my thinking about generosity. While at Rice, I had the opportunity to collaborate with several additional students on the Science of Generosity project, including undergraduate students Zanaib Schipchandler, Xiannan Lu, Gabriel David, Mark Trainer, Giacoma Frateschi, Angela Wu, and Richard Woo. In 2013, with a nearly one-year-old and almost three-year-old in tow, my husband and I went on the market together and accepted joint positions at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, myself in the Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice as an assistant professor, and he in the Department of Physics as a visiting assistant professor. In three short years, we launched our professoriate careers while raising two young children. I nursed in hotel bathrooms all over the country, with a stubborn tenacity to not become one of the gendered-outflows from academia. I had read a study early on in my academic career that gender-based pipeline leakage in academia is largely attributable to the coinciding of prime childbearing years with launching of academic careers. The study identified women having decreased participation in conferences as a key predictor of later more-­ advanced progression of male colleagues, who had been networking at those conferences in a steady trajectory toward greater leadership roles and thus were more likely to get elected to key positions in professional

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associations. This fueled my motivation, and I vowed not to become one of those statistics. It was not easy, but I made it. Many of my mom friends along the way did not. Many of my dad friends did not also, especially if they had primary caretaking roles for their children. Interestingly, the timing of my academic-family balancing experiences conjoined with many of the findings on the Science of Generosity project making their way into print. As readers will see in the forthcoming pages, many of these studies find connections between the maternal caring system, and parenting practices generally, and generosity. Some critics may point to this as an aspect of paternalism in generosity efforts, to which I am sympathetic. However, at the very least, we must include maternalism in the discussion, which I think shifts the conversation in a different direction. I digress, but this is an important aspect of the story. At the University of Arkansas, I had the opportunity to collaborate with my colleague from graduate school, Heather Price. Heather and I co-­ authored the book entitled American Generosity: Who Gives and Why (Oxford University Press, 2016), which also informs this book. One of my colleagues in the sociology department, Song Yang, and I also co-authored a journal article on the social network dynamics of charitable giving. Then, in 2016, I collaborated with my colleagues Casey Harris and Shauna Morimoto, also with Jared Peifer from Rice, to co-author a new grant proposal. This grant was for a project entitled the “Emerging Leaders Study: Intervening in the Social Science of Life-Course Generosity.” The grant was awarded by the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, through a project led by Una Osili, entitled “The Science and Imagination of Living Generously,” which was a re-grant through the John Templeton Foundation. It was in this project that I first met and began to benefit tremendously from Una, along with Sara Konrath, and David King of the Lake Institute of Faith and Giving. David and I actually first met when he walked into my presentation at the 2015 Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, and he then helped fund this study as well. Building upon the Science of Generosity, this new study investigated malleability of generosity in early and later emerging adults, through an experimental interaction with websites displaying different kinds of social science data. In the process of collaborating on that project, I benefited greatly from the conversations with David and Una, who were some of the first shapers of my understanding of philanthropy, and its relationship to generosity. To the extent that I describe that relationship well, it is due to their generosity of knowledge.

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I then spent five years as an assistant and then associate professor, along with co-directing the newly revitalizing Center for Social Research with my colleague Casey Harris. During that time, I had the good fortune to collaborate with the following undergraduate students: Seth Washispack, Camille Wildburger, Emma Thompson, April Moore, Grant King, Connor Thompson, Tiffany Miller, Jada Holmes, Olivia Chambers, Garrett Story, Zina Hardin, Bryn Smernoff, Tatianna Balis, and Sanjana Venugopal. I am particularly indebted to Bryn, Tatianna, and Sanjana for the ways that they inspired my research and writing. For example, Bryn devoted an entire summer to traveling to Washington D.C. to serve as a visiting scholar with me in the Pew Research Center, considering generosity and religiosity of teens. I also was fortunate to collaborate with the following graduate students: Christina Williams, Randi Combs, Carrie Nelms, Angela Cox, James Brown, Richard Woods, DeAndre’ Beadle, Christina Williams, Elizabeth Word, and Tasmiah Amreen. Combined, these students represented a wide range of disciplines, and they each in their ways contributed to earlier stages of this book’s interdisciplinary development. Deserving of particular acknowledgment is Tiffany. Tiffany Hood, MA, is an alumnus of the graduate program in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at the University of Arkansas, where she was also my graduate assistant in the Center for Social Research. Tiffany helped tremendously in the initial gathering stages of the literature reviewing that informed this book, including assisting in building the Zotero library of publications and providing annotated bibliographies on the first half of the project publications. She also conducted additional searches to locate related publications that were not directly produced by the Science of Generosity project but that nevertheless form some of the broader context into which these publications contribute. In 2018, I was awarded tenure and also accepted and moved to a new position as the Melvin Simon Chair and Associate Professor of Philanthropy in the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, IUPUI in Indianapolis, Indiana. My husband accepted an offer to join a new School of Engineering in the University of Indianapolis, and we moved our sevenand six-year-old children. Thankfully, our children weathered the move well and enjoy living in Indianapolis, where they at long last have family in town to celebrate holidays and school events with, along with an occasional pizza night. These family dynamics deserve acknowledgment in the midst of the academic contexts that inform this book. I admit to being a full person, a mom and a scholar. I owe thanks in particular to my former

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chair, Anna Zajicek, and vice chair, Shauna Morimoto, for supporting me in vocalizing those dual identities. Being part of the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy affords many wonderful connections. In particular, I am grateful for the ways that this book is informed by conversations with Gene Tempel, Deb Mesch, Una Osili, Amir Pasic, David King, Pamala Wiepking, Mark Ottoni-Wilhelm, Patrick Dwyer, Laurie Paarlberg, Sara Konrath, Lehn Benjamin, Dwight Burlingame, Chelsea Clark, and Patrick Rooney. Gene in particular provided helpful feedback on a constructive reorientation to the introductory chapter. Already in my time in the school, I have also benefited from conversations with several emerging scholars in the school, including Dana Doan, Jamie Goodwin, Tiara Dungy, Jin Ai, Kidist Yasin, and Andy Williams. These doctoral students are among the most thoughtful and engaged students with whom I have had the opportunity to work. Two students in particular deserve more specific acknowledgments for their direct contributions to this book (below). Additionally, I have also benefited from conversations with master’s students: Julia Kohl, Haley Turisi, and Bryan Fegley, as well as undergraduate student David Johnson, who is simultaneously a leader in a new start-up nonprofit organization called Spring Oath that coalesces informal helping efforts to aid local community members. Among these emerging scholars and students, two had the most direct contributions to the formation of this book: Christina Eggenberger and Jamie Goodwin. Christina Eggenberger is currently a doctoral student in the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy. She received her Master’s in College Counseling from the University of Delaware and her interests involve global service learning and philanthropic education. Christina helped to organize many of the Science of Generosity publications for this book, including aiding in tracking the current affiliations for the co-authors who have been involved in disseminating project findings. Christina’s struggles to understand the publications’ methods and findings highlighted some of the challenges of interdisciplinarity  that are addressed in Chap. 5. Jamie Goodwin is currently a doctoral student in the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, who is also a graduate assistant for the Lake Institute on Faith and Giving, as well as a senior fellow at the Sagamore Institute in Indianapolis, Indiana. Jamie was previously the Executive Director at Global Indiana, Visiting Lecturer at the University of Seville, Director of Advancement at Covenant Christian High School, a reporter for the Indianapolis Star, and a former high school teacher of

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Spanish and Journalism. As such, Jamie offered a unique blend of practitioner, graduate student, and emerging scholar insights in her co-­authoring of the conclusion of this book (Chap. 6). Last but not least, I am forever indebted to the ways that Omar Lizardo, now Professor of Sociology at UCLA, informed my thinking about classical and contemporary theory. To the extent that my conceptual framework in Chap. 1 is helpful, I owe that to Omar (if it is not, that is on me!). I am also most grateful to all the established and emerging scholars and practitioners involved in the Science of Generosity projects. Every single person that I and my students could identify as helping to disseminate the findings of the initiative is listed in the introduction. Most importantly, none of this work would have been possible without the generous support of the John Templeton Foundation, in particular with the support of Kimon Sargeant, now Vice President of Programs for the foundation. Indianapolis, IN, USA

Patricia Snell Herzog

Bibliography Bekkers, René, and Pamala Wiepking. 2007. Generosity and Philanthropy: A Literature Review. Science of Generosity. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame. Retrieved from: https://generosityresearch.nd.edu/assets/17632/ generosity_and_philanthropy_final.pdf Collett, Jessica L., and Christopher Morrissey. 2007. The Social Psychology of Generosity: The State of Current Interdisciplinary Research. Science of Generosity. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame. Retrieved from: https:// generosityresearch.nd.edu/assets/17634/social_psychology_of_generosity_final.pdf Herzog, Patricia Snell, and Heather E.  Price. 2016. American Generosity: Who Gives and Why. New York: Oxford University Press. Lincoln, Ryan, Christopher A.  Morrissey, and Peter Mundey. 2008. Religious Giving: A Literature Review. Science of Generosity. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame. Retrieved from: https://generosityresearch.nd.edu/assets/20447/ religious_giving_final.pdf Vaidyanathan, Brandon. 2008. Corporate Giving: A Literature Review. Science of Generosity. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame. Retrieved from: https:// generosityresearch.nd.edu/assets/17636/corporate_giving_final.pdf

Contents

1 Introduction: The Science of Generosity: From Disparate to Integrated  1 Need for the Book   2 Scholarly Contributions   3 Science of Generosity Initiative   5 Approach of the Book  14 Plan for the Book  15 Bibliography  16 2 The Manifestations of Generosity: From Cooperation to Social Justice 21 Philanthropy  22 Generosity  23 Cooperation  24 Informal Helping  27 Relational Generosity  27 Charitable Giving  29 Volunteering  32 Political Action  34 Blood and Organ Donation  36 Social Justice  37 Conceptual Framework  38 Bibliography  45

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3 The Causes of Generosity: From Attachment to Cultural Solidarity 53 Individual Causes  55 Family Causes  62 Interpersonal Causes  64 Group, Community, and Organizational Causes  75 Institutional Causes  79 Societal and Cultural Causes  85 Multiplicative Causes  88 Bibliography  88 4 The Consequences of Generosity: From the Interpersonal to the Collective 93 Individual Consequences  94 Interpersonal Consequences  96 Group Consequences  97 Organizational Consequences  98 Social Network Consequences  99 Community Consequences 101 Institutional Consequences 103 Rippling Consequences 104 Bibliography 106 5 The Interdisciplinary Study of Generosity: The Sum Is Greater Than Its Parts109 Interdisciplinarity 109 Interdisciplinarity in the Science of Generosity 114 Ten Challenges of Interdisciplinarity 131 Ten Opportunities for Interdisciplinarity 140 Bibliography 142 6 Conclusion: Generosity in Action—Benefiting the Collective Good145 Jamie Goodwin Implications for Emerging Scholars 146 Implications for Practitioners 152 For Future Study 156 Bibliography 157

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7 Appendix: On Studying Generosity161 A Research Roadmap 162 Experimental Methods 172 Survey Methods 173 In-depth Interview Methods 176 Existing Data, Secondary Analysis Methods 177 Mixed Methods 178 Meta-analysis Methods 180 Literature Review Methods 181 Production Versus Consumption of Knowledge 181 The Iterative Research Process 182 Bibliography 185 Index187

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 2.3 Fig. 2.4 Fig. 2.5 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 3.3 Fig. 3.4 Fig. 3.5 Fig. 3.6 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2 Fig. 7.1

Conceptual relationship between generosity and philanthropy 24 Global nonprofit charitable sectors as proportion of GDP for 16 countries31 Global full-time volunteer workforce in millions for 10 countries33 Global political action for 13 countries 35 Conceptual framework for macro-, meso-, and micro-level social dynamics 38 Multiple and dynamic agents of socialization 54 Result of multivariate pathways of genetic and environmental effects on prosociality in Knafo-Noam et al. (2015, p. 6) 59 Schematic drawing of the Sebastián-Enesco and Warneken (2015, p. 46) Sharing Task 67 The power of the ask store studied in Andreoni and Rao (2011, p. 631)73 Structural equation model for religious effects in Beyerlein (2016)78 Generosity across European regions in Glanville et al. (2016, p. 535 and 543) 87 Gift networks in hunter-gatherer societies; Apicella et al. (2012) 102 Rippling consequences of generosity 104 Interdisciplinarity in the Science of Generosity, word count by publication115 Geographic locations of Science of Generosity research data collection131 Research roadmap: Ten steps involved in the research process 163

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List of Figures

Fig. 7.2 Fig. 7.3

First 6 steps in a “how a bill becomes a law” rendition of the makings of the Science of Generosity Initiative Second 4 steps in a “how a bill becomes a law” rendition of the makings of the Science of Generosity Initiative

183 184

List of Tables

Table 5.1 Table 5.2 Table 5.3

Science of Generosity projects, by number, publication, chapter, topic, method, sample, geography, discipline 116 Science of Generosity journal publications (45 publication outlets)138 Ten challenges and opportunities of interdisciplinarity 140

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: The Science of Generosity: From Disparate to Integrated

Parents hope to instill it in their kids, and clergy in their congregations. It affects the functioning of governments and nonprofits, businesses and families. Ancient proverbs and TED talks alike tout its benefits. Yet, scholars’ understanding of generosity remains limited, and the literature straddles a dozen or more disciplines using different methodologies and vocabularies. Those interested in the study of giving must invest (scarce) time and energy to track multiple discipline-specific academic journals and engage in interdisciplinary dialogs on their own. To launch a more coherent field around this complicated subject, the John Templeton Foundation dedicated a $5-million grant to the Science of Generosity Initiative. The research that the initiative has funded has helped reduce the problem of scholarly isolation by funding research projects across a range of fields. But as of yet, these insights remain relatively segregated into discipline-specific journals or books summarizing a single study from the initiative. This book provides a comprehensive summary of the Science of Generosity Initiative’s findings, integrating insights from disparate disciplines to facilitate a broader understanding of giving. The purpose of this book is to advance understanding of the causes, manifestations, and consequences of generosity in human life. How do people come to believe that generosity is important? In what ways do they give of their time, money, and attention? What difference does generosity make to the giver, the recipient, or society as a whole? What are the costs © The Author(s) 2020 P. S. Herzog, The Science of Generosity, Palgrave Studies in Altruism, Morality, and Social Solidarity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26500-7_1

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of a lack of generosity? How do families, social networks, and political and economic institutions shape generosity around the world? This book addresses these questions with research from the Science of Generosity Initiative and provides implications toward benefiting the collective good.

Need for the Book Generosity research needs a more commonly shared knowledge base. Generosity and philanthropy are studied in many different disciplines, and knowledge is dispersed over a number of fields of study. This hinders communication among scholars working on the subject, inhibits knowledge of results obtained in other disciplines and fields, and limits overall scholarly progress. The scholarship produced thus far by the initiative and its investigators are each a small step toward reducing these problems of scholarly isolation. What remained unfinished is a greater, explicit linking of the knowledge produced by the study that communicates findings across disciplinary boundaries. The initiative began these cross-disciplinary dialogs, bringing together scholars from different disciplines who are engaged in a similar topic, but with different approaches. Yet, the learning gained in these cross-disciplinary dialogs ended with the last shared conference, and ultimately the scholarship produced was published within the disciplines from which the scholars came. This means that, without this book, readers would need to search through a wide variety of scholarly journals to glean learning from these studies. One reason such a problem remains is that thousands of discipline-­ specific, and subfield-related journals exist, making it a monumental task to keep abreast of them all. Instead, most scholars narrow their sights on a few specialized journals, and rely upon books to make the broader, agenda-setting connections required to elevate above discipline silos. Another reason that disparate scholarship continues to plague studies of generosity are the many keywords employed to describe research topics. What in one field is known as altruism is called “warm glow” in another and “prosocial” in yet another. To overcome these disciplinary boundaries, this comprehensive book on the findings of the Science of Generosity Initiative is designed to bring these findings together in the same place in order to aid readers in acquiring shared intellectual knowledge and to stimulate new, interdisciplinary ideas.

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Scholarly Contributions This book contributes to literatures on generosity in five main ways: summarizing new research on the understudied subject of learning to give; describing and offering access to available scholarship on the many manifestations of generosity; documenting recent multi-method studies on giving, and what multiple approaches can contribute to the complex task of understanding the causes of generosity; highlighting the lesser-known consequences of generous behavior; and synthesizing research on giving from multiple disciplines. Focusing on Learning to Give Giving is a patently learned behavior, yet—prior to this initiative—the existing theoretical accounts lent few insights into how and when it is learned. Social psychology offers valuable insights into the ways that generous behavior may be acquired. For instance, with “operant conditioning,” children learn to be helpful and altruistic through receiving rewards for generous behavior and punishment for not exhibiting it (Grusec 1991). Modeling—rooted in work on social learning theory (e.g. Bandura 1965, 1982, 1977)—can also be a factor in the development of prosocial behavior. When children see others acting generously, they are more likely to be generous themselves. Parents are the most influential models cited by altruistic adolescents and adults, and they are the primary socialization agents in individuals’ lives. However, learning to give can occur across the life span. Religious leaders, for example, teach giving to their congregations via practices, teachings, and rituals (Miller 1999). Finally, role identities may help explain how people are socialized to give to charitable and religious causes and organizations. But how all of these dynamics actually operate in the real world remained grossly understudied. This book responds to this problem by drawing upon the Science of Generosity projects to explain how individuals learn to give. Improving Access to Newly Available Survey Data on the Manifestations of Generosity There are manifold problems related to data collection on giving. Two basic factors threaten the validity of survey research on the subject: the lack of accurate recall may lead to underreporting of giving behavior,

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while social desirability may lead to overreporting (Hall 2001). To compensate for these difficulties, scholars recommend longer giving modules, which allow for prompting respondents to consider many different types of giving, over short ones (Bekkers and Wiepking 2006). Collecting more multilevel panel data would allow for a quantum leap forward in the quality of research on charitable and religious giving. The field is in need of more longitudinal data with valid instruments to measure a wide range of prosocial behaviors. Additionally, scholars would benefit greatly from data representing a wider variety of contexts and traditions. Most of the literature on religious giving, for instance, focuses on American Christianity. Global data would help scholars better understand how geographic, cultural, and political contexts impact religious giving. More work is also needed to understand giving in religious traditions besides Christianity. Finally, the majority of currently available surveys do not explore the causal mechanisms of generosity; their measures focus, rather, on simple correlates of generous behavior, which do not allow for drawing definite conclusions about cause and effect. To better address issues of causation, social scientists must specify and test the mechanisms by which structure produces patterns of events (Danermark et al. 2006; Hedström and Swedberg 1998). The Science of Generosity Initiative has generated new, high-quality datasets on generosity that help to fill these gaps. This book describes the new data made available by the initiative and gains broader access to these findings for interested scholars across a range of disciplines. Learning from Multiple Methods To take one illustrative example, why people in certain social groups (for example, in certain religious groups, or the college-educated) give more is rarely clear from survey data. Surveys can include measures of the mechanisms explaining these differences, but another strategy for studying them is to conduct focus groups, interviews, and lab experiments designed to examine these factors. The projects funded by the Science of Generosity Initiative use these methods, in addition to survey data, to shed new light on the roots of generous behavior.

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Gaining Insights on the Consequences of Generous Behavior Far more research has investigated the causes of generosity than the consequences, and the benefits of giving are more assumed than demonstrated. Most current research on the subject also ignores the possibility that the short- and long-term effects of generous behavior might be different, and fails to test whether different generous acts, or acts of generosity on the part of different institutions, produce different consequences. Using research generated from the Science of Generosity Initiative, this book takes up such questions and thus expands knowledge of how the full spectrum of giving behaviors affects individuals, groups, and societies. Synthesizing and Encouraging Cross-Discipline Generosity Research In summary, the nascent field of generosity draws upon scholarship in many different disciplines that are not often in conversation with one another. This book provides a synthesis of findings from disparate fields, both from the Science of Generosity Initiative and from other research. To encourage future scholarship on generosity, the book also identifies some of the key theoretical issues in the field, suggests ways to improve empirical research, and showcases scholars known for their studies of matters related to generosity. These efforts will help move the scientific understanding of generosity to a new level.

Science of Generosity Initiative The Science of Generosity Initiative requested research proposals from across the globe to study the roots, expressions, and effects of generous activities. From hundreds of submitted proposals, 14 high-quality projects were awarded funding. The principal investigators represent a range of social science disciplines that made use of multiple methods and a variety of national and international contexts to conduct their analyses. Their research has been published in multiple academic journals in various fields, such as Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the Journal of Marriage and Family, and PLoS ONE, as well as in books from Oxford University Press and the National Bureau of Economic Research. The lead investigators and topics of the 14 funded studies are summarized below, alphabetized by the last name of the PI.

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First, a team of researchers studied the power of asking and why people say “yes” (or how they manage to say “no”) to requests to give, as well as everyday mechanisms of compliance with norms of unselfish behavior. They also studied how government grants affect donor contributions, asking whether public grants “crowd out” individual-level or institutional-­ level giving, by dampening the extent to which donors think a cause is in need of private support. These researchers also studied how two forms of community diversity—racial-ethnic and religious—affect giving rates, finding that both have an impact, but in distinct ways. This project was led by James Andreoni, Professor of Economics at the University of California, San Diego. As part of this initiative, Andreoni collaborated with A. Abigail Payne, Ronald Henderson Professor of Economics and Director of the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research at the University of Melbourne; Justin M. Rao, Head Economist and VP of Data Science at HomeAway; Deniz Aydin, Assistant Professor of Finance at Washington University in St. Louis; B. Douglas Bernheim, Edward Ames Edmonds Professor and Chair of the Department of Economics at Stanford University; Jeffrey Naecker, Assistant Professor of Economics at Wesleyan University in California; Laura K.  Gee, Assistant Professor of Economics at Tufts University; Justin Smith, Associate Professor of Economics at Wilfrid Laurier University; as well as several researchers who were students at the time of this collaboration, including economics doctoral students Blake Barton, Christine Exley, and Paul Wong from Stanford University and Hannah Trachtman from Yale University, as well as David Karp a master’s student in Economics Policy at McMaster University in Canada. Second, the team conducted a neuroimaging study with parents and non-parents, aiming to identify the neural circuitry underlying altruistic behavior. Their research explored the “caregiving system,” which involves the ways that requests for help can activate a parental response. While this caring system is typically activated in parent-child response dynamics, these researchers found that the same neurological reactions occurred during helping within non-kin relationships. This team was led by Stephanie Brown, Associate Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at Stony Brook School of Medicine. Brown collaborated with James E. Swain, Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science and the Medical Director of Inpatient Psychiatry at Stony Brook University; Israel Liberzon, Department Head of Psychiatry in the Texas A&M College of Medicine; Sara Konrath, Associate Professor of Philanthropic Studies in the Indiana

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University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy; and Shao-Shaun Ho, Assistant Research Scientist in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Michigan. Third, using data from longitudinal surveys and behavioral experiments, researchers investigated the “social contagion” of generosity: whether generosity can spread from one person to another and whether structural aspects of people’s social relationships affect how generous they are. Focusing on cooperation, these researchers found that cooperation “cascades” through networks, meaning that cooperation by one person was spread through their network, up to three degrees of separation from the original actor (in other words, a friend, of a friend, of a friend was also cooperative). Plus, cooperation is greater in networks that are regularly updated. Static network connections, which are not regularly pruned (such as through “friending” and “defriending”), were less likely to spread cooperation than updated networks. This team was led by Nicholas A. Christakis, Sol Goldman Family Professor of Social and Natural Science and Professor of Sociology at Yale University; and James H.  Fowler, Professor of Political Science at the University of California San Diego. As part of this initiative, Christakis and Fowler collaborated with James A.  O’Malley, Professor of Biostatistics at Dartmouth University; Darby Miller Steiger, Consultant for Gallup and the Director of Research of the Gallup Panel; Coren L. Apicella, Assistant Professor of Psychology and the Director of the Human Behavior and Origins Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania; Frank W. Marlowe, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Harvard University; along with Systems Biology doctoral student researchers David G. Rand at Harvard University and Samuel Arbesman at Cornell University. Fourth, researchers conducted a behavioral experiment to assess if “attachment security” affects compassion and generosity toward others. Attachment security is one’s feeling of being worthy of love, along with a perceived ability to rely on others when needed. The research team found that attachment security was indeed related to generosity and that interventions could prime greater attachment security, increasing propensity to be generous. This team was led by Omri Gillath, Associate Professor of Psychology at University of Kansas; Ruth Ann Atchley, Associate Professor of Cognitive and Clinical Psychology at the University of Kansas; and Mohamed El-Hodiri, Professor of Economics at the University of Kansas. These scholars additionally collaborated with Ali Imran, Research Scientists and Statistical Data Analyst at the University of Kansas; and Ana Yen, who

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was, at the time, a student at the University of Kansas. Their research drew upon a previous study, which also included collaborators: Mario Mikulincer, who was, at the time, Professor of Psychology at Bar-Ilan University; Philip R. Shaver, Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Davis; and Rachel A. Nitzberg, who was previously a student at the University of California, Davis. Fifth, researchers investigated the genetic, environmental, and psychobiological factors that contribute to the development of a generous disposition by performing three longitudinal twin studies. They found, for example, that children with otherwise normal cognitive process and with low affective perspective-taking abilities demonstrated few prosocial behaviors when interacting with their same-sex siblings than did children with higher affective perspective taking. In the Longitudinal Israeli Study of Twins (LIST), they found that about a quarter of differences in empathy levels were attributable to genetic factors, while about 17 percent were attributed to shared environment, and over half were attributed to non-­ shared environment and error terms. This team was led by Ariel Knafo, Professor of Psychology at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Richard P. Ebstein, Professor of Psychology at the National University of Singapore; and Carolyn Zahn-Waxler, an Honorary Fellow in the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. These scholars additionally collaborated and co-authored with Salomon Israel, Faculty of Social Science in the Department of Psychology at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Gary Bornstein, Professor of Psychology and member of the Center for Study of Rationality at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Idan Shalev, Assistant Professor of Biobehavioral Health at Pennsylvania State University; Reut Avinun, Postdoctoral Associate at the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University; Florina Uzefovsky Senior Lecturer in the Department of Psychology at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and Haifa University Research Fellow at Cambridge University; Maayan Davidov, Academic Staff in the Paul Baerwald School of Social Work and Social Welfare at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Inga Gritsenko of the S. Herzog Memorial Hospital in Jerusalem; Tami Steinberg of the Schneider Children’s Medical Centre, Petach Tiqva, Israel; and Ira Goldner who was at the time a graduate student in the Department of Psychology at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Sixth, focusing on contemporary Britain, researchers analyzed the manifestations of generosity and found that a large proportion (70 percent) of

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the population engages in giving. These researchers also investigated socio-structural forces shaping individuals’ generosity, the effects of giving on givers, and the links between three domains of generosity: charitable giving, civic volunteering, and informal helping. They find that socioeconomic status affects rates of participation in giving activities, with people in higher professional and managerial positions the most likely to be joiners and givers, with about a quarter more participation than workers in manual labor positions. This team was led by Yaojun Li, Professor of Social Change and Sociology in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Manchester, as well as a faculty affiliate with the Cathie Marsh Institute for Social Research and the Manchester China Institute. For this project, Li collaborated with Anthony Heath, Emeritus Professor of Sociology and Fellow of Nuffield College at University of Oxford; Fiona Devine, Professor of Business and Head of Alliance Manchester Business School at the University of Manchester; Mike Savage, Martin White Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science; Alan Warde, Professor of Sociology in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Manchester; Neil Smith, Research Director of the National Centre for Social Research; and Peter Dangerfield, Senior Researcher and Co-Director of the British Social Attitudes series of the National Centre for Social Research. Seventh, researchers experimentally studied generous acts in real work settings, in Spain and Japan, to investigate whether and how acts of generosity can spread across a work-based social network, and to what effect. The researchers found that employees who were asked to think about positive aspects of the workplace were happier over time than employees in the same workplace who were only asked to think about work tasks. Additionally, they found that being in social proximity to givers of everyday acts of kindness promoted wellbeing more than did being in proximity to observers, and being in proximity to receivers actually appeared to slightly decrease wellbeing. Yet, being in proximity to both givers and receivers gave a boost to engaging in prosocial behaviors. This team was led by Sonja Lyubomirsky, Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Riverside. Lyubomirsky collaborated on this project with Kristin Layous, Assistant Professor of Psychology at California State University, East Bay; Katherine Jacobs (Bao), Assistant Professor of Psychology at Manhattanville College; and Joseph Chancellor, who was at the time a graduate student at the University of California, Riverside.

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Eight, investigating the before and after of a rollout of a local microfinance provider’s new branches in South India, researchers evaluated how the introduction of microfinancing influences generosity in poor communities. These researchers found that 18 months after microfinancing was introduced, borrowing activities shifted from informal to formal, relying on bank borrowing more than borrowing from family and friends. However, the same was not true of saving and insurance activities, meaning that participants were assuming greater financing risk in the early months after microfinancing was newly introduced into a rural village in India. Nevertheless, the impact on net generosity is unknown, as the decreased reliance on friends and family for support may have enabled greater giving on the part of those social supports, who were less burdened. This team was led by Rohini Pande, Mohammed Kamal Professor in the Kennedy School of Public Policy at Harvard University. Pande collaborated with Christine Binzel, Professor of Economic Sciences at Friedrich-Alexander Universitat Erlangen-Nurnberg; and Erica Field, Professor of Economics and Global Health at Duke University. Ninth, researchers studied cross-cultural differences in generosity and religiosity. Specifically, they focused on volunteering and found that both public forms of religiosity—frequency of religious service attendance— and private forms of religiosity—such as importance of religiosity, prayer, and belief in afterlife—predict greater volunteering activity. Importantly, the interaction of private and public forms of religiosity enhanced the prediction of volunteering involvement, such that volunteering was higher among those who prayed daily or more in conjunction with attending religious services frequently. Moreover, participation in generous activities was higher in places that had a greater degree of general social trust. Plus, social trust was found in an experiment to be malleable in response to social interactions. Thus, the social context is important for understanding the manifestations and causes of generosity. This team was led by Pamela Paxton, Linda K.  George and John Wilson Professor of Sociology and Senior Faculty Fellow at the Ronya and George Kozmetsky Center for Philanthropy and Community Service at University of Texas at Austin. For this project, Paxton collaborated with Jennifer Glanville, Professor and Chair of the Department of Sociology at the University of Iowa. Tenth, researchers explored how and why Americans undertake a wide variety of generous acts by fielding a nationally representative survey, interviewing a smaller sample of survey participants in person, and spending several hours with these households in participant observations.

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Included in this analysis was a wide variety of generosity expressions, including charitable giving, volunteering, political action, blood and organ donation, environmental sustainability efforts, informal helping, and relational generosity. They also investigated the consequences of being generous and found that numerous positive health and wellbeing outcomes are associated with giving activities. This team was led by Christian Smith, William R.  Kenan, Jr. Professor of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame; Kraig Beyerlein, Associate Professor of Sociology at University of Notre Dame; Patricia Snell Herzog, Melvin Simon Chair and Associate Professor of Philanthropic Studies in the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy; Jessica Collett, Professor of Sociology at the University of California at Los Angeles; and Stephen Vaisey, Professor of Sociology at Duke University. These scholars additionally collaborated with Heather Price, Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership at Marian University in Wisconsin; Song Yang, Professor of Sociology at the University of Arkansas; Hilary Davidson, Visiting Research Associate at Rice University; and Kelly Bergstrand, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at University of Texas at Arlington. Eleventh, researchers investigated the early development of prosocial behavior through several experimental studies with young children. Initial expressions of generosity in early childhood include helping and sharing with others. In the first set of experiments, they found that the majority of two-year-olds (78 percent) helped without any social encouragement. An additional 11 percent helped when counting verbal attempts to inform as helping. Moreover, in a second experiment, these researchers found that children who were able to defer gratification, by saving for later, were more likely to share, than children who saved less. Additionally, five-year-­ old children shared more overall than did three-year-old children. In a cross-cultural study, these researchers also found that children in India give in response to parental role-modeling of generosity, whereas U.S. children did not. This team was led by Felix Warneken, Associate Professor of Psychology at University of Michigan. Warneken collaborated and co-­ authored publications on these findings with Katherine McAuliffe, Assistant Professor of Psychology at Boston College; Carla Ileana Sebastián-Enesco, Assistant Professor of Education at Universidad de La Rioja; Peter R.  Blake, Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, and Director of the Social Development and Learning Lab at Boston University; Patricia Kanngiesser, Freigeist

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Fellow and Research Group Leader at Freie Universitat; Tara C. Callaghan, Director for the Center for Research on Culture and Human Development at St. Francis Xavier University, Canada; Jillian J.  Jordan, Postdoctoral Fellow in Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University; John E. Corbit, who at the time was a doctoral student in the Department of Psychology at Simon Fraser University, Canada; and Emily Orlins, who at the time was an undergraduate student in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. Twelfth, researchers employed several methods—experiments, interviews, case studies, and surveys—to study how Catholicism and Islam foster generosity among adherents in four major cities within four European countries: Turkey, Ireland, Italy, and France. Among the many rich results that this mixed-methods design returned are the following findings. First, from in-depth interviews, Muslims more commonly described their giving as part of a duty to God, whereas Catholics often denied the potential that their giving was enacting a duty to God. Second, in an experiment that primed specific religious beliefs, religious primes caused greater donations in Catholics but not in Muslims.1 The researchers unpack these findings, and more explanation is provided in the chapters that follow. Nevertheless, one implication is that the Catholic participants could give at significantly greater rates if religiously primed before donating. This team was led by Carolyn Warner, Associate Professor of Politics and Global Studies at Arizona State University; Adam B.  Cohen, Professor of Psychology at Arizona State University; and Ramazan Kılınç, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Nebraska Omaha. These researchers additionally collaborated and co-authored publications of project findings with Christopher W.  Hale, Assistant Professor of Political Science at University of Alabama; Kathryn A. Johnson, Associate Research Professor in the Department of Psychology at Arizona State University; Gina L.  Mazza, Research Assistant at the Mayo Clinic; Craig K.  Enders, 1  In particular, among the Catholic participants, priming religious beliefs (such as duty to God, belief in God’s grace, and deservedness) resulted in two-to-three times greater odds of giving than Catholic participants who were not primed with these religious belief (but were primed with a similar reflection activity). Second, these primes did not result in statistically different results in giving for the Muslim participants (relative to Muslim participants who were not religiously primed). One possibility is that zakat practices and a salient belief in duty to God among the Muslim participants may already “absorb” a great deal of philanthropic giving, meaning that the primed participants did not give at a higher rate relative to the high rate already present among the non-primed participants.

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Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of California Los Angeles; Jonathan E. Cook, Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at The Pennsylvania State University; and doctoral student Michael H.  Pasek in the Department of Social Psychology at The Pennsylvania State University. Thirteenth, based on a survey of young married couples in the United States (ages 18–45  years old), researchers examined whether generosity fosters greater marital quality and how gender, religious faith, and familism (i.e. a commitment to lifelong marriage and to fulfilling family obligations) influence the generosity of spouses toward one another and toward others. In terms of the consequences of marital generosity, these researchers found that couples who were giving to each other in everyday ways within their marriages had greater satisfaction with their marriage, and lower perception that they were likely to divorce. Additionally, they found that marital generosity was also linked to community volunteering. Along the lines of a long-standing idea called the “greedy marriage” theory, they found that some couples were inward-facing, resulting in less community volunteering. These couples were those in which the wives placed a high value on romantic, soul mate type marriages. Alternatively, couples that focused on the institutional aspects of marriage, in terms of co-parenting and sharing finances, were more outward-facing, by engaging in volunteering. In terms of predictors of marital generosity, these researchers found that both progressive, egalitarian and familistic, religious couples had greater martial generosity than other married couples. This team was led by Bradford Wilcox, Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia. Wilcox co-authored with Jeffrey Dew, Associate Professor in the Department of Family, Consumer, and Human Development at Utah State University, and Young-il Kim, Assistant Professor of Sociology at George Fox University. Fourteenth, researchers utilized nationally representative panel data to study parents’ motives for socializing children to be generous, the causal effects of parents’ role-modeling and verbal encouragement on children’s generosity, and the effects of local community conditions on children’s generosity. Cumulatively, the findings of these researchers indicate the importance of nurturing inclinations to give in children and youth. For example, they found that when parents role-modeled giving, 20 percent of girls gave more than girls without parental role-modeling of giving. Similarly, though apparently through a different mechanism of parental influence, they found that when parents talked about giving, 16 percent of boys gave more than

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boys without parental giving talk. Paralleling these findings, participation in volunteering was greater for role-modeled girls (18 percent) and for talkedto boys (13 percent). Moreover, the effects were cumulative, such that adolescents who had parents that role-­modeled and talked about giving engaged in giving 33 percent more and in volunteering 47 percent more. Yet, 16 percent of parents stopped talking to their children about giving as they aged from childhood to adolescence. This research helps to highlight the importance of parents remaining engaged in socializing giving and volunteering. This project was led by Mark Ottoni-Wilhelm, Professor of Economics at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis. OttoniWilhelm co-authored publications of project findings with David B. Estell, Associate Professor, Head of the Department of Counseling and Educational Psychology, and Head of the Human Development Program in the School of Education at Indiana University; Una Okonkow Osili, Professor of Economics and Philanthropic Studies and Associate Dean for Research and International Programs in the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy; Neil H. Perdue, Vice President and Chief Operating Officer at University of Indianapolis; and Ye Zhang, Principal Research Associate at IMPAQ International, LLC.

Approach of the Book The purpose of this book is to represent the findings of each research project while also relaying these results in a more readable and accessible format than their journal publications, which are written for a specialized and technically interested audience. Drawing upon this existing scholarship, this book summarizes the Science of Generosity Initiative’s findings on the neurological, cross-cultural, network, social psychological, political, and religious processes involved in generous activities, interpreting their significance for general readers. The conclusion then extrapolates beyond the immediate scholarly contributions to draw out implications for social and cultural change, always returning the research findings to the litmus test of: So what? In so doing, the book provides accessible insights on these topics: how people originally learn to be generous and not generous; the relationship between generosity of money, time, helping, and emotional support; causal mechanisms generating voluntary religious and charitable financial giving; social psychological obstacles to generosity and how they are reinforced and overcome; comparative cross-national research on political, economic, and cultural influences;

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institutional and cultural generators of generosity; social network dynamics shaping generosity; empirical tax policy implications for generosity; innovations in experimental studies of generosity; ethnographic studies of financial giving and v­ olunteering in organizations; mechanisms promoting prosocial planned estate and corporate giving; intergenerational transmission of generosity; the mental and physical health consequences of generosity; and contributions of voluntary generosity to the common good of society.

Plan for the Book Using findings from the Science of Generosity Initiative, and additional scholarship, Chap. 2 summarizes the various manifestations of generosity, such as giving money, possessions, time, attention, aid, encouragement, and emotional availability. People can make these gifts through a charitable, philanthropic, or civic organization or through less formal means, including within marriages, family relationships, and social networks. Chapter 3 focuses on findings regarding what causes people to be generous, how people learn to give, and what factors support them in carrying out generous actions. Giving takes effort that can be inhibited by the busyness of everyday life. To be able to give, people require access to at least some economic, social, or psychological resources, and they must see those resources as available to give, worthy of giving, and plentiful enough to be given without great risk. This chapter also explains how cultural and political climates shape the exercise of generosity. Chapter 4 discusses the consequences of generosity for givers, for receivers, for institutions, and for society more generally in the sphere of culture, religion, politics, and economics. For givers and receivers, some of these consequences play out in an ongoing, reciprocal process involving both rewards and sanctions. Findings on the interpersonal dynamics of generosity within social networks, especially the flow of generous activities across social ties, are also described. Chapter 5 explains how different disciplines illuminate various aspects of the same phenomenon. The Science of Generosity Initiative projects employ multiple methods to explore generous activities and their correlates through a myriad of lenses. This chapter integrates their findings into an understanding of generosity as it develops within individuals, plays out in dyadic and group relationships, and takes form in institutions to affect outcomes as each level.

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The conclusion summarizes the central themes of the book and their relevance for comprehending the full sphere of generous activities, from causes through to consequences. It draws out the implications of these studies for relevant practitioner audiences, with a focus on philanthropic studies, nonprofit management, and fundraising efforts more generally. In addition, a methodological appendix summarizes several generosity datasets available for future studies.

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Avinun, Reut, Salomon Israel, Idan Shalev, Inga Gritsenko, Gary Bornstein, Richard P. Ebstein, and Ariel Knafo. 2011. AVPR1A Variant Associated with Preschoolers’ Lower Altruistic Behavior. PLoS One 6 (9): e25274. Bandura, Alfred. 1965. Influence of Models’ Reinforcement Contingencies on the Acquisition of Imitative Responses. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 1: 589–595. ———. 1977. Social Learning Theory. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall. ———. 1982. Self Efficacy Mechanism in Human Agency. American Psychologist 37: 747–755. Bekkers, René, and Pamala Wiepking. 2006. To Give or Not to Give, That Is the Question: How Methodology Is Destiny in Dutch Giving Data. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 35 (3): 533–540. Beyerlein, Kraig. 2016. The Effect of Religion on Blood Donation in the United States. Sociology of Religion 77 (4): 408–435. Beyerlein, Kraig, and Kelly Bergstrand. 2016. It Takes Two: A Dyadic Model of Recruitment to Civic Activity. Social Science Research 60 (November): 163–180. Binzel, Christine, Erica Field, and Rohini Pande. 2013. Does the Arrival of a Formal Financial Institution Alter Informal Sharing Arrangements? Experimental Evidence from Village India. Harvard University Kennedy School Working Paper. Retrieved from https://scholar.harvard.edu/rpande/ working-papers Blake, Peter R., John Corbit, Tara C. Callaghan, and Felix Warneken. 2016. Give as I Give: Adult Influence on Children’s Giving in Two Cultures. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 152: 149–160. Chancellor, Joseph Andrew. 2013. Ripples of Generosity in the Workplace: The Benefits of Giving, Getting, and Glimpsing. Riverside: University of California. Chancellor, Joseph, Kristin Layous, and Sonja Lyubomirsky. 2015. Recalling Positive Events at Work Makes Employees Feel Happier, Move More, but Interact Less: A 6-Week Randomized Controlled Intervention at a Japanese Workplace. Journal of Happiness Studies 16 (4): 871–887. Chancellor, Joseph, Seth Margolis, and Sonja Lyubomirsky. 2018. The Propagation of Everyday Prosociality in the Workplace. The Journal of Positive Psychology 13 (3): 271–283. Cohen, Adam B., Gina L. Mazza, Kathryn A. Johnson, Craig K. Enders, Carolyn M. Warner, Michael H. Pasek, and Jonathan E. Cook. 2017. Theorizing and Measuring Religiosity Across Cultures. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 43 (12): 1724–1736. Danermark, Berth, Mats Ekström, Liselotte Jakobsen, and Jan Ch. Karlsson. 2006. Explaining Society: Critical Realism in the Social Sciences. New  York: Routledge. Dew, Jeffrey, and W. Bradford Wilcox. 2013. Generosity and the Maintenance of Marital Quality. Journal of Marriage and Family 75 (5): 1218–1228.

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Fowler, James H., and Nicholas A.  Christakis. 2010. Cooperative Behavior Cascades in Human Social Networks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107 (12): 5334–5338. Gillath, Omri, Ruth Ann Atchley, A. Imran, Mohamed El-Hodiri, and Ana Yen. 2012. Promoting Generosity through Attachment Security. Annual Meeting of the International Association for Relationship Research (IARR). Chicago, IL. Glanville, Jennifer L., Pamela Paxton, and Yan Wang. 2016. Social Capital and Generosity: A Multilevel Analysis. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 45 (3): 526–547. Grusec, Joan E. 1991. Socialization of Concerns for Others in the Home. Developmental Psychology 27: 338–342. Hall, Michael H. 2001. Measurement Issues in Surveys of Giving and Volunteering and Strategies Applied in the Design of Canada’s National Survey of Giving, Volunteering and Participating. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 30 (3): 515–526. Hedström, Peter, and Richard Swedberg, eds. 1998. Social Mechanisms: An Analytical Approach to Social Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Herzog, Patricia Snell, and Heather E.  Price. 2016. American Generosity: Who Gives and Why. New York: Oxford University Press. Herzog, Patricia Snell, and Song Yang. 2018. Social Networks and Charitable Giving: Trusting, Doing, Asking, and Alter Primacy. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 47 (2): 376–394. Kanngiesser, Patricia, and Felix Warneken. 2012. Young Children Consider Merit When Sharing Resources with Others. PLoS One 7 (8): e43979. Kılınç, Ramazan, and Carolyn M. Warner. 2015. Micro-Foundations of Religion and Public Goods Provision: Belief, Belonging, and Giving in Catholicism and Islam. Politics and Religion 8 (4): 718–744. Kim, Young-Il, and Jeffrey Dew. 2016. Marital Investments and Community Involvement: A Test of Coser’s Greedy Marriage Thesis. Sociological Perspectives 59 (4): 743–759. Knafo, Ariel, and Florina Uzefovsky. 2015. Variation in Empathy: The Interplay of Genetic and Environmental Factors. In The Infant Mind: Origins of the Social Brain, ed. D.W. Haley and M.H. Bornstein. New York: Guilford Press. Knafo, Ariel, Tami Steinberg, and Ira Goldner. 2011. Children’s Low Affective Perspective-Taking Ability Is Associated with Low Self-Initiated Pro-Sociality. Emotion 11 (1): 194–198. Knafo-Noam, Ariel, Florina Uzefovsky, Salomon Israel, Maayan Davidov, and Carolyn Zahn-Waxler. 2015. The Prosocial Personality and Its Facets: Genetic and Environmental Architecture of Mother-Reported Behavior of 7-Year Old Twins. Frontiers in Psychology 6 (February): 112. Layous, Kristin, Joseph Chancellor, and Sonja Lyubomirsky. 2014. Positive Activities as Protective Factors against Mental Health Conditions. Journal of Abnormal Psychology 123 (1): 3–12.

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Li, Yaojun. 2015a. The Flow of Soul: A Sociological Study of Generosity in England and Wales (2001–2011). In The Handbook of Research Methods and Applications on Social Capital, 40–59. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing. ———. 2015b. Social Capital in Sociological Research: Conceptual Rigour and Empirical Application. In The Handbook of Research Methods and Applications on Social Capital, 1–20. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing. Li, Yaojun, Anthony Heath, and Fiona Devine. 2015a. Formal and Informal Social Connections in the UK. In The Handbook of Research Methods and Applications on Social Capital, ed. Y. Li, 187–203. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing. Li, Yaojun, Mike Savage, and Alan Warde. 2015b. Social Stratification, Social Capital and Cultural Practice in the UK. In The Handbook of Research Methods and Applications on Social Capital, 21–39. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing. Li, Yaojun, Neil Smith, and Peter Dangerfield. 2018. Social Trust: The Impact of Social Networks and Inequality. British Social Attitudes 35 (July): 1–25. Lyubomirsky, Sonja, Joseph Chancellor, and Katherine Jacobs. n.d. Lyubomirsky, Sonja Final Report - Ripples of Generosity in the Workplace: The Hedonic and Behavioral Benefits of Giving and Receiving. Riverside: University of California. McAuliffe, Katherine, Jillian J. Jordan, and Felix Warneken. 2015. Costly Third-­ Party Punishment in Young Children. Cognition 134 (January): 1–10. Mikulincer, Mario, Phillip R. Shaver, Omri Gillath, and Rachel A. Nitzberg. 2005. Attachment, Caregiving, and Altruism: Boosting Attachment Security Increases Compassion and Helping. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 89 (5): 817–839. Miller, Dale T. 1999. The Norm of Self-Interest. American Psychologist 54: 1053–1060. O’Malley, A.  James, Samuel Arbesman, Darby Miller Steiger, James H.  Fowler, and Nicholas A.  Christakis. 2012. Egocentric Social Network Structure, Health, and Pro-Social Behaviors in a National Panel Study of Americans. PLoS One 7 (5): e36250. Ottoni-Wilhelm, Mark, and Ye Zhang. n.d. Origins of the Gradient Between Altruistic Preferences and Income: Parental Motives to Socialize the Altruistic Preferences of Their Children. Work in Progress. IUPUI, Indianapolis. Ottoni-Wilhelm, Mark, David B. Estell, and Neil H. Perdue. 2014. Role-Modeling and Conversations about Giving in the Socialization of Adolescent Charitable Giving and Volunteering. Journal of Adolescence 37 (1): 53–66. Ottoni-Wilhelm, Mark, Ye Zhang, David B.  Estell, and Neil H.  Perdue. 2017. Raising Charitable Children: The Effects of Verbal Socialization and Role-­ Modeling on Children’s Giving. Journal of Population Economics 30 (1): 189–224. Ottoni-Wilhelm, Mark, Una O.  Osili, and Amir D.  Hayat. n.d. The Effects of Neighborhood and Community Characteristics on Children’s Prosocial Behavior. Work in Progress. IUPUI, Indianapolis.

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Paxton, Pamela, and Jennifer L. Glanville. 2015. Is Trust Rigid or Malleable? A Laboratory Experiment. Social Psychology Quarterly 78 (2): 194–204. Paxton, Pamela, Nicholas E. Reith, and Jennifer L. Glanville. 2014. Volunteering and the Dimensions of Religiosity: A Cross-National Analysis. Review of Religious Research 56 (4): 597–625. Rand, David G., Samuel Arbesman, and Nicholas A. Christakis. 2011. Dynamic Social Networks Promote Cooperation in Experiments with Humans. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 108 (48): 19193–19198. Sebastián-Enesco, Carla, and Felix Warneken. 2015. The Shadow of the Future: 5-Year-Olds, but Not 3-Year-Olds, Adjust Their Sharing in Anticipation of Reciprocation. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 129 (January): 40–54. Smith, Christian, and Hilary Davidson. 2014. The Paradox of Generosity: Giving We Receive, Grasping We Lose. New York: Oxford University Press. Smith, Christian, Jessica Collett, Kraig Beyerlein, Stephen Vaisey, and Patricia Snell (Herzog). 2008. The Science of Generosity Initiative Project Narrative. John Templeton Foundation. University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN. Swain, James E., and Shao-Hsuan Shaun Ho. 2017. Parental Brain: The Crucible of Compassion. New York: Oxford University Press. Swain, James E., Sara Konrath, Stephanie L.  Brown, Eric D.  Finegood, Leyla B. Akce, Carolyn J. Dayton, and S. Shaun Ho. 2012. Parenting and Beyond: Common Neurocircuits Underlying Parental and Altruistic Caregiving. Parenting: Science & Practice 12 (2/3): 115–123. Warneken, Felix. 2013. Young Children Proactively Remedy Unnoticed Accidents. Cognition 126 (1): 101–108. Warneken, Felix, and Emily Orlins. 2015. Children Tell White Lies to Make Others Feel Better. British Journal of Developmental Psychology 33 (3): 259–270. Warner, Carolyn M., Ramazan Kılınç, Christopher W. Hale, Adam B. Cohen, and Kathryn A. Johnson. 2015. Religion and Public Goods Provision: Experimental and Interview Evidence from Catholicism and Islam in Europe. Comparative Politics 47 (2): 189–209. Warner, Carolyn M., Ramazan Kılınç, Christopher W. Hale, and Adam B. Cohen. 2018a. Generating Generosity in Catholicism and Islam. New York: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2018b. Generating Generosity in Catholicism and Islam: Generosity, Public Goods Provision, and Religious Beliefs in Catholicism and Islam: An Experiment. In Generating Generosity in Catholicism and Islam, 67–88. New York: Cambridge University Press. Wilcox, W. Bradford, and Jeffrey Dew. 2016. The Social and Cultural Predictors of Generosity in Marriage: Gender Egalitarianism, Religiosity, and Familism. Journal of Family Issues 37 (1): 97–118.

CHAPTER 2

The Manifestations of Generosity: From Cooperation to Social Justice

In the Science of Generosity Initiative, as well as in other scholarship, scholars conceive of generosity as including a broad range of activities, such as financial donations to charitable causes, volunteering, taking political action, donating blood and organs, and informal helping. This definition includes the giving of money, possessions, bodily materials, time, or talent in the form of formal volunteering, assistance in the form of informal helping, attention and affection in the form of relational generosity, compassion and empathy, and many other activities that are intended to enhance the wellbeing of others, beyond the self. Many of these activities occur through organizations, such as nonprofit organizations with tax-­ exempt status. However, the activities need not occur through organizations and can occur instead through interpersonal, group, and other collective interactions. People can also be relationally generous to one another. While many diverse activities constitute generosity, the common thread uniting these activities is an orientation toward benefiting the wellbeing of others. In essence, excluded from this definition are activities that are intended only for self-benefit or private profit alone. Individuals as private actors may ultimately also benefit from engaging in generous and philanthropic activities, but there must at least be an intention to benefit others beyond the personal self to qualify as generous and philanthropic. Alternatively, others may not ultimately benefit from generous and ­philanthropic activities. While these activities must be directed at the aim © The Author(s) 2020 P. S. Herzog, The Science of Generosity, Palgrave Studies in Altruism, Morality, and Social Solidarity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26500-7_2

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of broader community or public benefit, and not purely self-beneficial, it may be the case that these efforts fail in their intended endeavor. This failure to benefit others does not disqualify their inclusion within definitions of generosity. That the intention to benefit others beyond the self was present still demarcates an effort to engage in generous or philanthropic activities. Thus, in what follows, generosity is conceived of as a broad term that encompasses orientations and actions that are intended to benefit the wellbeing of others, beyond the self. Several manifestations of generosity are reviewed, including cooperation, informal helping, relational or interpersonal generosity, charitable giving of money or resources, volunteering time, taking political action, blood and organ donation, and social justice. Subsequently, a conceptual framework is described, which highlights the micro-, meso-, and macro-level units of social life generally, and which has implications for understanding the science of generosity. First, a distinction is made between philanthropy and generosity, highlighting important overlapping aspects to these concepts (e.g. McCrea et al. 2013), while also delineating ways that the terms are not fully synonymous.

Philanthropy Simply defined, philanthropy is “private giving for public purposes” (Barman 2017, p.  222). Philanthropy is a broad umbrella term that encompasses numerous activities contributing to what is often called the third sector. There are a wide variety of ways to refer to this sector, including the nonprofit sector, third sector, independent sector, voluntary sector, charitable sector, social sector, and non-governmental sector (LeRoux and Feeney 2014). For a variety of reasons, these terms are all somewhat problematic, offering less-than-ideal ways to refer to the activities in this sector. For example, the nonprofit sector defines the sector by what it is not, rather than what is. Same is true of the non-governmental sector. The third sector implies that this area was developed historically after the first and second sectors, preceded by for-profit and governmental activities. Yet, this is historically inaccurate, since philanthropic activities predate these institutions. The voluntary sector implies that all participation in this sector is volunteering, when nonprofits are rather a major employer. For example, in the United States, nonprofits contribute more than $600 billion to the economy in wages and salaries (McKeever et al. 2016). The independent sector is not only named after an actual existing organization

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(independentsector.org), but it wrongfully implies that nonprofit organizations are acting in autonomous ways, whereas the other two sectors are dependent. Nothing could be further from the truth. Indeed, collaboration and coordination exist across each sector in ways that are often challenging to disentangle, even to the astute legal scholar or well-versed governmental actor. Setting these other and less-than-ideal terms aside, the philanthropic sector remains the best way to refer to the sum total of activities that have intentions for altruistic ends. People engaged in philanthropy want to change the world for the better, and it is this fundamentally moral action that defines a unity in an otherwise diverse array of missions directed toward distinct ends (Payton and Moody 2008). All U.S. nonprofit organizations must be designed to contribute toward the greater public good, through mandate of their tax-exempt status (IRS Code Section 501(c)3 2018). This public-directed mission means that nonprofit organizations should be attending toward altruistic, other-oriented outcomes. These other-oriented and altruistic outcomes are a directing framework for philanthropic practices around the world (Wiepking and Handy 2015). Whether nonprofits achieve these intended ends is another question (Zunz 2014). Relevant in this book is the intention to benefit others through concerted actions. Another benefit of engaging the term “philanthropy” is that included activities are not limited to only nonprofit organizations. Many private entities can be other-directed as well, and increasingly businesses are engaging in social innovation and have social good departments that are also altruistically motivated and other-oriented. Excluded from this definition of philanthropy are informal and interpersonal forms of helping that benefit family and friends (Barman 2017; Daly 2012; Simpson and Willer 2015). Combining existing approaches and definitions, for the purposes of this book, the following definition is engaged: Philanthropy refers to mobilized, collective, and formalized efforts to contribute to the wellbeing of others.

Generosity Returning to generosity, there is an important connection between the word “generosity” and the word “philanthropy,” but these terms are not entirely synonymous. Generosity focuses on the motivations, actions, ­orientations, and inclinations to do good for others (Herzog and Price 2016).

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Fig. 2.1  Conceptual relationship between generosity and philanthropy. (Source: Author created)

Philanthropy focuses on the sector, the professional field, the network of relationships embedded within organizations and their interactions. Some of this distinction is in the connotation of the terms, and can vary from culture to culture (Wiepking and Handy 2015). Yet, for the purposes of this book, the terms generosity and philanthropy are engaged as two distinct concepts, which can have a high degree of overlap. Figure 2.1 visualizes this approach by displaying a Venn diagram with depicted overlap among the terms philanthropy and generosity, while also displaying that each term also has non-overlapping aspects that are not synonymous. Philanthropy refers to the sector of activities that contains a sum total of economic, social, and political power (Barman 2017). Distinctly, generosity refers to the personal and interpersonal dynamics of philanthropy, including how people engage with social institutions to affect change on behalf of others—loved ones or generalized others (Herzog and Price 2016; Smith and Davidson 2014). Philanthropy occurs through a collection of concerted efforts, often by professionals who are employed in foundations, nonprofit organizations, or business social impact departments (Salamon 2014). Generosity occurs through everyday encounters, random acts of kindness, ways that people enact beliefs and values in their social interactions, and ultimately also through actions taken with wallets and time allotments. Philanthropy relies on generosity, and generosity is fostered through philanthropy.

Cooperation While many publications on generosity and philanthropy begin with charitable giving, this book begins instead with cooperation as the first manifestation of generosity. Cooperation refers to actions that are intended to maximize outcomes for both the self and the other (Klapwijk and Van

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Lange 2009). At the most basic level, this can be thought of as “tit-for-­tat” exchanges in which one person reciprocates favors from the other, also referred to as reciprocity. Yet, social life is more complex than that basic idea sustains, and thus it is necessary to expand this understanding to include indirect actions designed to contribute to the wellbeing of a partnership or group, which may not be returned in a direct and uniform fashion. For example, in marital partnerships, some couples engage in everyday acts of kindness for the good of the couple. One partner unloads the dishwasher; the other takes out the trash. On the weekends, one partner plays with and supervises the children, while the other partner mows the lawn or works on a house project. In the most basic form of social interaction— a dyad: one person interacting with another person—there can be relative harmony when both partners think they are contributing to and receiving from participating in the union. Alternatively, discord results when one person feels they are putting in more than they are getting out (Dew and Wilcox 2013). Experimental studies often seek to focus on cooperative behavior, as one of the most basic features of generosity. For example, Fowler and Christakis (2010) examined cooperation in an experiment in which participants were provided with money units that they could keep or contribute to another participant. In this design, each money unit that was contributed to the collective group would return 40 percent of a money unit back to each of the four members of the group. The returned amount was not as much as if one person clung to their original unit, but the total of the group could add up to more, if everyone cooperated. What these researchers found is that every money unit that was contributed by one person in the group resulted, on average, in a 20 percent increase in money units contributed by other members of the group. In other words, cooperation breeds cooperation. Generosity is reciprocated by the generosity of others. Cooperation relies upon trust, especially because reciprocity does not often occur in a sequential pattern. Social interactions are typically ­syncopated, resulting in cooperation happening across disjointed moments in time. Today, one partner contributes to the wellbeing of the other, while tomorrow or the following week, the other partner returns the favor. Cooperation intensifies in complexity when moving beyond the relatively simple unit of the dyad, to larger social entities, such as groups of friends or clubs. For example, when going out to eat together, one friend forgets their wallet, and the other offers to pay. If trust is high, and cooperation assumed, the paying person trusts that the other friend will repay the tab

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and pays without hesitation. However, if the non-paying friend repeatedly forgets their wallet on friend outings, the paying friends may grow weary of this exchange and seek to end a nonreciprocal relationship, either through refusing to pay or by no longer meeting with the friend. In this respect, it is important to acknowledge the darker underbelly of cooperation. In attending to group dynamics, especially those that are intended to be generous, there is an inclination to focus on the positive aspects alone. When intentions to benefit others are present, there can be a working assumption that benefits to others in fact accrue. They can, but they can also accrue to participants in unequal ways, and with differential outcomes (Simpson and Willer 2015). Group participation also involves costs. For example, some people can exert more effort than others in the group, resulting in the classic “free rider” problem, in which some members freely benefit from the contributions of others, while not carrying their own load, nor contributing to the benefit of other members. Attending to this issue raises awareness of the fact that cooperation is not an inevitable outcome of group dynamics, nor is it always desirable for all members. For these reasons, groups often form ways of ensuring compliance with group expectations, by sanctioning violations of social norms. Sanctions often bring to mind formal punishments, but groups often engage in informal means of enforcing norms, such as gossip or other reputational infringements that highlight annoyance with nonconformity. Nevertheless, in spite of this potentially negative underbelly, cooperation is a basic component to generosity, and ultimately philanthropy. Cooperation fuels relationships and strengthens network connections. As a key aspect of relational connections, cooperation is motivated from emotional commitments, concern for the welfare of others, and the sense of having a moral obligation to act in ways that are commensurate with others’ expectations. In a comprehensive review of scholarship on cooperation and prosocial behavior, Simpson and Willer (2015; p. 52) state that “studies of naturally occurring networks find that generosity decreases as the network distance between individuals increases, such that people are generous toward friends of friends, somewhat less so toward friends of friends of friends, and least generous toward more distal others or strangers (Apicella et  al. 2012; Baldassarri & Groussman 2013; Leider et  al. 2009).” Specifically, cooperation cascades through three degrees of network connections, meaning that being cooperative with a network connection resulted in that person in turn being more cooperative with another in their network; yet, cooperation declined by three people out.

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Informal Helping Another manifestation of generosity is informal helping. Similar to cooperation, informal helping often occurs within the contexts of small groups and interpersonal relationships. Perhaps unlike cooperation, informal helping is not necessarily provided with an expectation for reciprocity. Rather, people often respond to others who appear to be in distress, however minor, to offer their help and assistance. For example, a person walking by a homeless person on the street may offer their money or food. In some cases, informal helping is given in response to a specific request for help, such as when a neighbor knocks on the door to ask for a ride because their car broke down. In other cases, people offer informal help without being asked. Warneken (2013) refers to this as “proactive helping,” and views this to be a particularly human quality. For example, when one person sees another drop something, they may pick it up and hand it to the person immediately, before the person even notices that something was dropped. This kind of response to others is almost involuntary, or at least often unconscious. Yet, not everyone has this kind of immediate informal helping response. Informal helpings, and many other manifestations of generosity, are closely linked with empathy. Studies consistently find that whether or not a person has an empathic response is a strong predictor of whether or not they will engage in informal helping (for example, Einolf 2008; Graziano et al. 2007). It is perhaps because of the almost involuntary reactions involved in informal helping that lead many psychologists to conclude that these are personality characteristics, such that people have prosocial personalities that underlie fairly consistent participation in activities that are helpful to others (for example, Knafo-Noam et al. 2015).

Relational Generosity A cousin of informal helping is relational generosity. Smith and Davidson (2014) define relational generosity as being “generous with one’s attention and emotions in relationships with other people” (p.  18). According to Smith and Hill (2009), relational generosity is composed of nine components: attention, compassion, open-handedness, self-extension, magnanimity, other-investment, courage, verbal expression, and forgiveness. Attention refers to focusing on a friend or family member when they are in need, stopping preoccupations in order to be truly present. Compassion is feeling

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sorry for people when they are having trouble, responding kindly when friends or family members have something discouraging happen to them, or being willing to “go the extra mile” to help take care of loved ones. Openhandedness indicates a willingness to help others first, to care of others before or beyond taking care of oneself, and being happy about it. Similarly, self-extension is about caring for others as well as, if not better, than one cares for oneself, basing personal happiness on the extent to which loved ones are happy and thriving. Magnanimity is about being the “bigger” person, in terms of being slow to anger at others and working hard to see issues from others’ perspectives; it is also about being willing to be generous to others even without reward or appreciation. Other-investment is partaking actively in activities designed to make others feel appreciated, such as finding books or movies that a friend or family member likes, or in other ways creating opportunities for others. Courage in this relational sense refers to being willing to risk one’s own reputation or feelings in order to help another, getting past any timidity to comfort by “going out on a limb” to support others. Similar to the activities of other-investment, verbal expression refers to stating positive regard and appreciation to friends and family members. Lastly, forgiveness is letting go of grudges and being willing to continue relationships even when hurt by another. Beyond these orientations, relationally generous activities include visiting with friends and family, having friends over to one’s home, taking care of other people’s children (without pay), and watching over the house or other property of friends and family while they are away. In terms of the presence of relational generosity in the United States, Herzog and Price (2016) found that this was one of the highest of nine different forms of generosity. Forty-six percent of Americans engage in relational giving. The only higher prevalence in the nine forms of generosity (including c­ haritable giving, volunteering, blood and organ donation, among others), was lending possessions, at 49 percent, which itself can be considered a specific form of relational giving. While the overall rate of participation in relational giving is high, there is considerable skew toward activities that involve fairly minimal amounts of effort. For example, the highest rate of participation among these activities was visiting with friends and family members, which could be as much or more self-serving than it is generous. As far as effort-heavy giving of other-­ oriented activities, far fewer (only 19 percent) engage regularly (twice a month or more) in activities such as helping a neighbor with a house proj-

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ect or watching a neighbor’s children. In summary, interpersonal forms of generosity have one of the highest rates of participation, and thus this is an important activity that deserves study. Ignoring it as a form of generosity can underrepresent many activities in which people engage to care for others. Yet, the mere presence of this activity alone is not necessarily an expression of generosity, as the truer measures are activities that require more intense effort on the part of the giver. People engage in this kind of effort-heavy relational generosity far less, but still sizably.

Charitable Giving Perhaps the most well-studied aspect of generosity is charitable giving: donating money or material goods to support nonprofit or religious causes. As far as individual giving in the United States is concerned, estimates from the Philanthropy Panel Study (PPS) indicate that about half of households donate $25 or more to charitable causes (56 percent in 2015). When considering even a single dollar donated, the Science of Generosity survey similarly found that about half charitably give (55 percent in 2010). In summary, nearly one out of two give to charitable causes, or with a “glass half empty” perspective, about one out of every two Americans does not donate. This average hides a tremendous skew in how much people donate, such as only about 15 percent gave more than $1000 annually (Herzog and Price 2016). It also obscures who donates, with even higher average donation amounts once various social characteristics are added to an analysis. For example, it is possible to interact with the PPS data through the Give-O-Meter tool on the GenerosityForLife.org website (2019). A few questions begin the interaction, requesting entry of household income, annual charitable giving, volunteering, age, and educational attainment. This is a helpful tool to compare one’s own giving with the giving of others. This tool can also be employed to learn about different levels of giving based on characteristics of one’s choosing, not necessarily only personal descriptors. If curious about average giving in the United States, one can enter average data, such as the median household income of $60,336 (U.S. Census 2017), by selecting the range $50,001–$100,000. Some college is  the median educational attainment in the United States, and the median age is 38 (entered as 32–47). Enter zero dollars for charitable giving and zero hours for volunteering, and select a state, then “Next.” For the North Central geographic region (commonly known as the Midwest), the Give-­

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O-­Meter reports that this is in the 53rd percentile for giving. Comparatively, for people of similar means, giving nothing is in the 60th percentile in the Northeast, 36th percentile in the South, and 35th percentile in the West. Stated differently, using the benchmark of median national data, Northeasterners give less on average than Midwesterners, who give less on average than Westerners and Southerners. However, there may be fewer people in the South who fit the median national trend, and more in the Northeast; thus, given differences in resources, these data should not be viewed as representing more or less generosity per se. Returning to the national level, Giving USA (2018) estimates that charitable giving in the United States totaled to more than $410 billion in 2017. Seventy percent of these donations ($287 billion) were donated by individuals, compared to 16 percent by foundations, 9 percent by bequests, and 5 percent by corporations. The largest and fastest growing cause was religious, with a 31 percent increase in 2017. The second largest cause was education, which increased by 14 percent in 2017, and the third fastest-­ growing cause was human services, which increased by 12 percent in 2017. In summary, charitable giving is a major enterprise in the United States, contributing substantial dollars annually to support generous causes. Globally, the United States does not have the largest nonprofit sector, at least in terms of contributions to Gross Domestic Product (United Nations 2013). The United States is surpassed by Canada, with about 8 percent of GDP in the nonprofit sector, then Israel with about 7 percent, third with Mozambique at 6.7 percent, and then, the United States with 6.5 percent. Figure 2.2 compares nonprofit charitable sectors as a portion of Gross Domestic Product for 16 countries. Moreover, Li (2015) found that individual charitable giving rates are even higher in the United Kingdom, with more than 70 percent of people in England and Wales engaging in charitable giving. In terms of who charitably donates, donative behavior is more common among people who are employed, have higher incomes, own homes, are older, married, have college degrees, and attend religious services frequently (Herzog and Price 2016; LeRoux and Feeney 2014). Important qualifications exist within these broad trends. For example, though giving amounts are generally higher among people with greater incomes, giving as a percentage of income reveals different trends. People who have low and middle incomes give a greater proportion of their discretionary income, on average, than do people with the highest incomes (Wilhelm 2007). Moreover, there are important intersections among social and

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Fig. 2.2  Global nonprofit charitable sectors as proportion of GDP for 16 countries. (Source: Author created from United Nations (2013))

demographic characteristics. For instance, college education, income, and religiosity importantly intersect in explaining who gives (Bekkers and Wiepking 2011; Wiepking and Bekkers 2012; Herzog and Price 2016). In particular, these combinations of social statuses help to explain the varied types of approaches that people have to their donative actions, which accumulate into distinct giving amounts, with high income and college degrees more likely to plan their giving, whereas religious attenders with fewer resources give habitually as a percentage of modest amounts, and those with high incomes and low religiosity are more likely to give impulsively (Herzog and Price 2016). As far as where donations are contributed, religion-related causes are the greatest sub-sector in the United States, receiving nearly a third of all charitable contributions (McKeever 2018). The second largest sub-sector for charitable contributions is education (14 percent), followed by human services (12 percent). Interestingly, gifts to foundations (11 percent) currently

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exceeds the proportion of contributions that are donated for health-­related causes (9 percent). Other sub-sector beneficiaries include international affairs (6 percent), public-society benefit (7 percent), arts, culture, and humanities (5 percent), environment and animals (3 percent), and gifts to individuals (2 percent). Cross-culturally, there are challenges in studying the sub-sector recipients globally (Casey 2016). In particular, many of the educational and health services provided in non-U.S. countries are supported and delivered through the public, governmental sector. Moreover, in many developing countries, the donations that are received for these sub-sector purposes are contributed from foreign sources, such as U.S.based international aid. Workers in these foreign-supported nonprofit organizations are often paid higher than local workers, and expatriate nonprofit workers are benchmarked to wages in countries of origin.

Volunteering Giving money or material resources is only one way in which people can support charitable activities, and an equally important and well-studied aspect of generosity is volunteering time: donating unpaid labor for charitable causes. Many assume that time is donated more often than money, but this is not typically true. For example, in the United States, only about one in four donate even an hour of time within a month (Herzog and Price 2016). In England and Wales, about 60 percent of the population engages in volunteering, yet this is still less than donating on average, with 70 percent of the British population donating (Li 2015). Nevertheless, volunteering is a major expression of generosity around the globe. If volunteers were gathered into a single geographic space, “volunteerland” would have the second largest population of adults of any country, producing the seventh largest gross domestic product (Salamon et al. 2011). The United Nations (2018) found that, when combining the amount of volunteer hours around the world into a full-time equivalent, there are 109 million volunteers. About a third of this is formal volunteering, which occurs within organizations or formalized groups, and about two-thirds is informal volunteering that occurs from person to person. Figure 2.3 visualizes a comparison of full-time equivalent volunteer labor in 10 countries, showing China to have the largest full-time equivalent volunteer workforce, with 775 million. Second is India, with 374 million, and third is the United States, with 149 million, then Indonesia, with 115 million. The U.N. lists “volunteeria” as a hypothetical country that gathers all full-­time equivalent workers into a single location, with a total of 109 million volunteers, which would

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Fig. 2.3  Global full-time volunteer workforce in millions for 10 countries. (Source: Author created from United Nations (2018))

make this hypothetical land be the fifth largest country. The Russian Federation, Japan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Mexico are the next six geographic regions, averaging more than 60 million full-time volunteers. In terms of who volunteers, Musick and Wilson (2007) offer the most comprehensive profile of volunteers published to date (see also Wilson 2000). Similar to charitable giving, education is one of the most consistent predictors of who volunteers, and people with higher incomes also volunteer more on average, as do people who are older on average. Women volunteer more than men, on average, especially when youth live in their household. Volunteering rates vary by race and ethnicity, but it is important to consider whether informal helping rates—which are harder to measure than formal volunteering rates—explain this. The Corporation for National and Community Service (2019) estimates that about one-third of Americans volunteer, with considerable variation by generation and life stage. About one-quarter of elderly people within the Silent Generation volunteer, compared to nearly one-third of older Baby Boomers, and slightly more than one-third of middle-aged

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Generation Xers. Younger Millennials and Generation Ys volunteer at a lower rate, at least during their currently younger life stage, at slightly more than one-quarter donating time to charitable causes. Globally, volunteering shares in common with charitable giving that most of these donative actions are organized through religious organizations (United Nations 2015). In addition to gender differences in volunteering, age also matters. Youth volunteering is especially high in countries that are experiencing a high degree of social change, displacement, and loss of traditional social structures, including viable working wages. In many countries that are experiencing significant changes in traditional structures, volunteering represents a form of collective action designed to express discontented voices of marginalized people. Indeed, volunteering is often a local resource that sustains a sense of voice and facilitates broader personal participation, collective accountability, and community responsiveness. In the Science of Generosity Initiative, Beyerlein and Bergstrand (2016) found that about one-quarter of Americans volunteer, though closer to onehalf of Americans were willing to volunteer. This underscores the need for volunteers to be asked to give, and Chap. 3 reviews findings about the causal importance of solicitations in inviting generous activities. In the European context, volunteering rates are higher on average, with Paxton et al. (2014) finding about a half of Europeans in 15 Western European countries donating their time. However, when examining rates by country in 19 European countries, Glanville et al. (2016) found that volunteering rates varied considerably, with the Nordic countries, such as western Germany, the Netherlands, and southern France, having the highest volunteering rates. Alternatively, Europeans in Austria, the Netherlands, and Germany provided considerably more informal help than Europeans in Spain, Poland, France, and Italy. Findings such as these underscore the need to investigate multiple expressions of generosity, highlighting the ways that informal helping and volunteering are not synonymous nor exchangeable forms of generosity.

Political Action Another form of being generous with time is to donate political action: activities in person or online which are designed to contribute to political change through providing support for political causes, campaigns, protests, or social movements. In the United States, people report participating in generous activities through political action even less than volunteering generally. For example, the Science of Generosity survey found that 87 percent gave not even a single hour to political action within a month. Of those

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who donated political action time, more than 60 percent gave less than five hours within a month, again resulting in a tremendous skew for a small proportion of people contributing the vast majority of time donated for political action. Combining political action with two of the other primary expressions of generosity—volunteering and donating—it is important to know that different types of people participate in each of these expressions. For example, older, female, married, non-­ Hispanic white, college-educated, and greater-incomed Americans are more likely to donate (Herzog and Price 2016). Volunteering is more likely for Americans who are married, have youth in their household, are frequent religious service attenders, and are college-educated. Political action is more likely for males, collegeeducated, greater-incomed, and newer residents. Globally, political action participation ranges from about a third of the country in Italy to nearly three-quarters in Kenya (Wike and Castillo 2018). Figure 2.4 shows political action rates as proportions of people in each of 13 countries reporting that they are likely to take political action

Fig. 2.4  Global political action for 13 countries. (Source: Author created from Pew Research Center (Wike and Castillo 2018))

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on a range of issues, including poor health care, poverty, poor-quality schools, freedom of speech, government corruption, police misconduct, and discrimination. Averaging across adult age groups (from 18 to more than 50 years old), Fig. 2.4 also shows country rates for self-reported participation in voting, ranging from less than two-thirds in Tunisia to more than 90 percent in Brazil. People are also increasingly engaging in political actions by posting comments online that address political and social issues. Averaging again across age ranges, online political action ranges from Indonesia’s one-in-ten rate to about one-third in Israel.

Blood and Organ Donation In addition to these expressions of generosity that involve giving of time and resources, another important form of generosity is giving physically of one’s bodily resources. Herzog and Price (2016) found that about 12 percent of Americans gave blood in the previous year, whereas approaching half (42 percent) are organ donors. Yet, again, there is a considerably higher proportion of people who are willing to donate blood than who actually donate, with nine in ten Americans being willing to donate, despite about eight of those nine not donating blood. In Chap. 3, findings from Beyerlein (2016) are reviewed to help explain this disconnect between who is willing to donate blood and who actually is generous with their bodily resources. Globally, the World Health Organization (2010, p. xi) asserts that: The donation of blood by voluntary non-remunerated blood donors is recognized as being crucial for the safety and sustainability of national blood supplies. Systems based on replacement donation by the family and friends of patients requiring transfusion are rarely able to meet clinical demands for blood while paid ‘donation’ poses serious threats to the health and safety of the recipients as well as the donors themselves.

In terms of the need, WHO (2010) reports that about 234 million major operations occur annually throughout the world, with about one-quarter of those for traumatic injuries and one-eighth for cancer treatment. Moreover, about one-quarter of maternal deaths during pregnancy are due to hemorrhage, which could be prevented if proper blood supply were available for transfusions. Only about 1 percent of the population is needed to supply minimum amounts of blood donations to service these needs. However, considerably less than this needed blood supply is donated, with

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less than 1 percent of people in 70 countries donating blood. For example, South-East Asia includes about one-quarter of the world population, yet less than one-tenth of the residents in South-East Asia donate blood, producing less than half of the demand. Moreover, Davies (2006) found major spatial inequalities in access to organ donation. Through residential segregation processes, the geographic distribution of organ availability particularly impacts black and Asian communities, resulting in a social and ethnic justice issue.

Social Justice Generous activities can be a major source of social justice. Social justice is concerned with how social resources are more or less equitably distributed among human society (Miller 1999). As context for understanding the role of generosity in social justice, it is important to note that poverty vulnerability is a major impetus for public sector governmental social programs. However, welfare states in the United States and Britain are not found to be adequate poverty-alleviation mechanisms (Worts et al. 2010). There exists a long history of seeking mechanisms beyond the state to respond to poverty. From the Greco-Romano tradition, political theory has long posited a connection between generosity and justice (e.g. Laks and Schoefield 1995). In this sense, generosity can be viewed as a “modality of power,” through which people exercise geopolitical care as expressions of morality and politics, delineating the boundaries of ethical responsiveness (Barnett and Land 2007). One of the primary means by which people engage in distributive justice efforts is through education, especially when educational efforts prioritize indigenous forms of knowledge construction and ground educational leadership within collective action strategies (Benham and Murakami-Ramalho 2010). To prioritize moral and political equity in the distribution of knowledge capital, educational pursuits are best driven by meaningful consensus, rather than individually dominant approaches (Bogotch 2002). Embedded within such approaches can be a rebellious and oppositional imagination that is designed to reconsider status quo practices (Rapp 2002). Generosity engaged in social justice can manifest as service-learning projects in which students form meaningful ­connections with people living  in poverty or homelessness and find shared forms of empowerment and change (Maybach 1996). Museums, the arts, and cultural activities can also embody social justice manifestations of generosity (e.g. Sandell and Nightingale 2013).

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Conceptual Framework In order to integrate knowledge generated from multiple disciplinary approaches, it is important to have a guiding conceptual framework: an interpretive tool for categorizing connections between formerly disparate pieces of information. Theories generated in the discipline of sociology are particularly helpful for intersecting disparate disciplines due to the nexus of macro-, meso-, and micro-levels of study (Turner 2016; Barman 2017). This book thus employs a sociological conceptual framework to guide this interdisciplinary endeavor. Figure  2.5 displays visually a set of theories regarding these different levels of analysis, and their intersections. Integrating theories from an area of scholarship referred to as “relational sociology” (e.g. Donati and Archer 2015), this approach conceptualizes people as relational and embedded within a confluence of structural contexts that both constrain and support ways that people express their personal agency. Simultaneously, people also shape and reshape these broader social contexts through their personal agency and collective efforts.

Fig. 2.5  Conceptual framework for macro-, meso-, and micro-level social dynamics. (Source: Author-created visualization of theories synthesized by Turner (2016))

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In ascending order, the figure begins at the bottom with the micro-­ level. The most basic level of social interaction is within the self. Included within the most micro-level unit of analysis is the genetic composition that uniquely identifies people as human beings. For example, in the Science of Generosity projects, the research by Knafo and colleagues investigated micro-level genetic factors involved in explaining propensity to engage in prosocial behavior (Avinun et  al. 2011; Knafo et  al. 2011; Avinun and Knafo 2012; Knafo-Noam et al. 2015; Knafo and Uzefovsky 2015). Also included within the micro-level unit are personal motivations and values. To assess personal motivations and values, scholars are often reliant on individuals to self-report their reasons. Quality reporting of personal reasons is derived from personal reflection. Personal reflection on social experiences is an individual-level exercise, which can—and often needs to—be done in isolation. Yet, personal reflection is also social insofar as a person considers the interaction between one’s personal identities with various social contexts. Personal identities are formed in reference to the social. In this initiative, Herzog and Price (2016) studied U.S. personal and social orientations and social demographics associated with generosity, and Li (2015) studied the latter in Britain. As Barman (2017, p. 228) summarizes: “a micro-level approach to philanthropy gives attention to individuals as donors, but sees their decision to give as shaped by the networks and norms of the local social context in which they are embedded.” Moving up Fig. 2.5, the second tier of micro-level social experiences are interpersonal interactions. The most basic unit of interpersonal interaction is a dyad: reciprocal communication between two people. One prototypical version of a dyad is a marital relationship. For example, in the Science of Generosity research, Wilcox and colleagues studied marital dyads as related to generosity (Dew and Wilcox 2013; Kim and Dew 2016; Wilcox and Dew 2016). Additionally, several researchers studied the power of asking within dyads and small networks of interpersonal interactions. Andreoni and colleagues, for instance, investigated what happens when unknown dyads connect (Andreoni et al. 2017; Andreoni and Rao 2011), focusing on “asks to give” from strangers, such as Salvation Army bell ringers soliciting gifts outside a grocery store. Similarly, Beyerlein and colleagues focused on dyad recruitment to volunteer and donate blood, in this case, among known friends (Beyerlein and Bergstrand 2016). Returning to charitable giving, Herzog and Yang (2018) investigated groups of friends, social networks, and found that the dyadic relationship with a primary friend (Alter 1) is key in giving asks.

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The third tier of Fig. 2.5 bridges between micro- and meso-level social interactions. Meso-level interactions refer to interactions that occur within groups and organizations. Typical meso-level units of analysis include families, schools, neighborhoods, businesses, and community organizations. Key organizations of interest are philanthropic foundations, nonprofits, voluntary associations, community and civic organizations. Beginning with the primary social organization of the family, social science identifies families as a primary source of socialization: the teaching and modeling of various social practices. Individuals are socialized into broader social expectations—social norms—through teaching and modeling, which in turn, guides interpersonal interactions and self-concepts. Teaching and modeling can be overt and explicit, or it can be implicit and subtle. For example, if a child picks his or her nose in public, a parent is likely to redirect the child through explicitly stating that picking noses in public is a norm violation, such as, “It is not polite to pick your nose in public.” An adult who does the same, on the other hand, may receive a disapproving glance, a more implicit but still important way for adults to socialize norms and communicate disapproval for norm violations. A tremendous amount of socialization occurs while people are young, before greater cognitive ability for awareness of these socialization efforts is fostered. Thus, young people can engrain modes of being and doing long before they gain the ability to reflect on why they are the way they are and why they act in these ways. Important, then, for understanding generosity is studying the roots of generosity within families. Several researchers in the Science of Generosity study these family, meso-level interactions. For instance, Brown and colleagues investigated how parental genetics influence early childhood interactions, including parents responding to children with generous relational attention (Swain and Ho 2017; Swain et al. 2012). Relatedly, Gillath and colleagues focused on attachment security, studying if forming healthy parent-child attachments promoted child generosity, expressed compassion and helping (Mikulincer et  al. 2005; Gillath et al. 2012). Ascending to the fourth tier in Fig. 2.5, a meso-level interaction is communication, through which identity is expressed, social roles are enacted, and cohesion among people is fostered, or not. Older models of socialization tended to understand young people as essentially a receptacle of adult socialization, but contemporary conceptualizations view socialization as bidirectional, meaning young people also influence adult socializers and are influenced by peers, not solely adults. Considering child agency, Warneken

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and colleagues studied how children react to various interventions designed to promote selfishness or generosity (Warneken and Orlins 2015; McAuliffe et  al. 2015; Blake et  al. 2016; Sebastián-Enesco and Warneken 2015; Kanngiesser and Warneken 2012; Warneken 2013). This included investigating how child reactions varied with age by comparing three-year-old to five-year-old children, finding that older children exercised more agency in reaction to experimental communications. Keeping with communication, bridged with socialization, Ottoni-­ Wilhelm and colleagues focused on parental modeling and teaching of generosity (Ottoni-Wilhelm et al. 2014, 2017). To foster generous identities in children and youth, some parents engage in verbal socialization efforts designed to promote greater giving, while some parents role-model giving behaviors to their children. On the whole, these efforts are successful: young people engage in more generous activities when socialized by parents to do so. Interestingly, these researchers found that parents tended on the whole to retreat in their intentional socialization efforts as youth aged further into adolescence, with negative impacts. Youth whose parents declined in their socialization efforts were less likely to engage in generous activities. The fifth tier in Fig. 2.5 includes groups and networks, focusing on the ways that connectivity, participation, and belonging influence social orientations and actions, such as generosity. Groups and networks shape experiences of connectivity, participation, and belonging, which inform communication, influencing identity, roles, and their cohesion or conflict. Likewise, groups and networks shape, and are shaped by, community organizations. Influence occurs bidirectionally, and meso-level units are key in bridging macro-level factors to micro-level experiences. In an article entitled “Beyond Altruism,” Simpson and Willer (2015) describe a darker underbelly to prosocial interactions, identifying several punitive measures that groups can enforce to ensure conformity with group participation norms. One example is reputation damage, whereby members of a group could intentionally tarnish the status of one who does not act prosocially. Likewise, Ariely and colleagues (2009) find that a desire to be liked by others is a primary driver of prosocial action. These group dynamics shape generosity expressions. Within the Science of Generosity projects, several researchers focused on groups and networks. For example, Andreoni and Gee (2012) studied peer punishment within small groups. They found that people were willing to pay money to have an external enforcer of group dynamics. These

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“hired guns” helped the group prevent free rider problems: when members of a group exert minimal to no effort but still reap the rewards of the efforts exerted by others. Alternately, Herzog and Yang (2018) found that having within one’s close social network people who give to charitable causes increased the chances of one’s own giving. These social influences on giving and collective efforts highlight the ways that meso-level factors involved in group dynamics help to understand generosity in ways that extend beyond individual-level factors alone. Similarly, participation in organizations also shapes generosity. Ascending to the sixth tier in Fig. 2.5, community organizations involve neighborhoods, businesses, schools, religious congregations, and civic organizations. Within the Science of Generosity Initiative, Lyubomirsky and colleagues studied workplaces as organizational contexts that can foster generosity networks (Lyubomirsky et  al. n.d.; Layous et  al. 2014; Chancellor et al. 2015, 2018). In this case, the focus was on the consequences of generosity in workplace networks, which are reviewed in Chap.  4. Additionally, Beyerlein (2016) focused on the organizational influences of religious congregations and found that “the more people attend religious services, the more likely they are to have religious ties” (p. 423), which is found to increase exposure to solicitations, helping messages, and self-efficacy. For example, people who have five religious ties are nearly three times more likely to be asked to give than are people with no religious ties. Another aspect of this tier is interfacing among organizations, often referred to as organizational ecologies or fields, which can cause mimicking or competition among organizations (Barman 2017). The next tier in Fig. 2.5 is social inequality. Micro- and meso-level processes converge in expressing social inequalities. As a bridge category between levels, social inequalities arise from gaps in access, skills, and knowledge at the intersection of macro- and meso-level social forces. These inequalities are patterned by race, ethnicity, gender, and social class statuses. For example, in the Science of Generosity research, Andreoni and colleagues studied the role of neighborhood-level diversity in Canada within charitable giving (Andreoni et al. 2011). In short, they found that neighborhoods that experienced a 10 percent growth in ethnic diversity resulted in 14 percent less donations. Alternatively, neighborhoods that had a 10 percent growth in religious diversity reduced donations by 10 percent. Also studying community-level inequalities, Pande and colleagues investigated microfinancing in India and found that the rollout of formal financing supplanted informal borrowing and gift-giving, with villagers

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ultimately less likely to share their resources with their networks (Binzel et al. 2013). Thus, at the community level, generosity dynamics are complex. Seeming improvements for the community, at the macro-level, can be a detriment to micro-level generosity. At least in the short run, betterments for communities do not appear to better all individual community members. However, there is tremendous variation at the individual level, and more studies are needed to investigate these multilevel dynamics (Barman 2017). At the eighth tier in Fig. 2.5, social institutions are primary macro-level units. Examples of social institutions are the economic system, the educational system, the political system, religious systems, and social media. Macro-level studies can focus on one of these social institutions in particular, such as the study of the economy in economics, or politics in political science. Additionally, studies can focus on the intersections among social institutions, as is often the case in macro-level sociology. For example, studies can investigate how changes in the political system affect families, and how this in turn reshapes the educational system. Within the Science of Generosity Initiative, Warner and colleagues studied cross-national comparisons in the intersection of religious and political institutions (Warner et  al. 2015, 2018a, b; Cohen et  al. 2017; Kılınç and Warner 2015). These researchers focused on countries with majority religions, of Islam and Catholicism, in which the state and the predominant religious institution are closely aligned, even synonymous. This approach yielded the ability to focus on religion as not simply an organizational context, as is often the case in a U.S. version of religiosity, but rather, to view the national cultural context as imbued with religious and political mechanisms that shape participation in generous activities. Also studying macro-level institutional factors, Andreoni and Payne (2011a, b) studied governmental relationships to generosity. In the United States, they found that governmental grants crowded out individual giving, at 14 cents per the dollar. Within a similar Canadian study, they found that government crowd-out of charitable giving was primarily due to decreased foundation support: a macro-level practice changed a meso-­level process, which resulted in different micro-level results. One potential implication of these studies is that increased government spending produces an individual disincentive for giving, and Anesi (2008) found that individual-level concerns for social reputation also result in disincentives for giving. Combined, these studies highlight the complexities involved in how generosity can be shaped, or misshaped, across mul-

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tiple social levels. Careful nuanced attention is needed to uncover the potential for unintended consequences at larger, more macro-level units as a result of micro-­level changes, and at micro-level units as a result of macro-level change, and also at meso-levels. Ascending to the highest tier in Fig.  2.5, society and culture are the largest macro-level units. Societies can be conceived of as mapping on to geopolitical boundaries, or as traversing national-level boundaries into larger social, political, and economic units. Culture refers to the shared values, norms, and beliefs within geopolitical boundaries. In the Science of Generosity research, Li and Paxton both investigated social capital as a macro-level factor in generosity. For instance, Li and colleagues found numerous relationships between social capital and generosity, in particular, establishing a link between the two via cultural tastes and preferences: people in professional and managerial occupations in England and Wales are more likely to engage in charitable giving and volunteering (Li 2015; Li, et al. 2015b; Li, Smith, and Dangerfield 2018). Similarly, in a crossnational comparison of European countries, Paxton and colleagues found that countries with greater proportions of social ties had higher volunteering rates: namely, a 10 percent increase in social ties across countries returned a 0.25 percent increase in country-level volunteering. Thus, the Science of Generosity research cumulatively finds support for micro-level, meso-level, and macro-level social forces in generosity. Generosity manifests at each level in ways that deserve careful unit-level analyses, as well as attention to cross-level interactions. The pyramid in Fig. 2.5 was reviewed in reverse order, from the micro-­ level interpersonal interactions, ascending upward through meso-level organizational processes, and culminating in macro-level societies and cultures. For example, self-identity guides interpersonal interaction, is expressed through group participation, and reproduces or causes change to broader social inequality dynamics, which culminate in societies with particular lifestyle habits and cultural tastes. Simultaneously, social processes also occur in the reverse order, with broader cultural values shaping the unintended and unconscious ways that community organizations are imbued with social inequities, in terms of which groups are supported and considered, and which groups are excluded in biased and unreflective ways. Moreover, communications flow through strongly supported network channels, resulting in subgroup ways of socializing the people who interact within these particular social contexts, and ultimately result in people who identify in ways that they feel uniquely express their individual

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selves, and yet which also group into noticeable and important patterns. Personal identities thus reflect social interactions among shared groups. For example, people who regularly interact on particular social media can perceive consensus in matters that have considerably less consensus within other social group interactions. This is commonly referred to as “echo chambers”: technologically mediated bubbles that reinforce opinions among a select group of people and provide a false sense of broader representation for those opinions (Flaxman et al. 2016; Garrett 2009).

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Cohen, Adam B., Gina L. Mazza, Kathryn A. Johnson, Craig K. Enders, Carolyn M. Warner, Michael H. Pasek, and Jonathan E. Cook. 2017. Theorizing and Measuring Religiosity Across Cultures. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 43 (12): 1724–1736. Corporation for National and Community Service. 2019. Volunteering in America. Washington, DC: AmeriCorps and Senior Corps. Retrieved from: https:// www.nationalservice.gov/serve/via/demographics Daly, Siobhan. 2012. Philanthropy as an Essentially Contested Concept. Voluntas: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations 23 (3): 535–557. Davies, Gail. 2006. Patterning the Geographies of Organ Transplantation: Corporeality, Generosity and Justice. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 31 (3): 257–271. Dew, Jeffrey, and W. Bradford Wilcox. 2013. Generosity and the Maintenance of Marital Quality. Journal of Marriage and Family 75 (5): 1218–1228. Donati, Pierpaolo, and Margaret S.  Archer. 2015. The Relational Subject. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Einolf, Christopher J. 2008. Empathic Concern and Prosocial Behaviors: A Test of Experimental Results Using Survey Data. Social Science Research 37 (4): 1267–1279. Flaxman, Seth, Sharad Goel, and Justin M.  Rao. 2016. Filter Bubbles, Echo Chambers, and Online News Consumption. Public Opinion Quarterly 80 (S1): 298–320. Fowler, James H., and Nicholas A.  Christakis. 2010. Cooperative behavior cascades in human social networks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107 (12): 5334–5338. Garrett, R. Kelly. 2009. Echo Chambers Online?: Politically Motivated Selective Exposure among Internet News Users. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 14 (2): 265–285. Gillath, Omri, Ruth Ann Atchley, A. Imran, Mohamed El-Hodiri, and Ana Yen. 2012. Promoting Generosity Through Attachment Security. Annual meeting of the International Association for Relationship Research (IARR), Chicago. Give-O-Meter. 2019. Give-O-Meter. IU Lilly Family School of Philanthropy. Retrieved from: www.GenerosityForLife.org Giving USA. 2018. Giving USA 2018: The Annual Report on Philanthropy for the Year 2017. Retrieved from: https://givingusa.org/ Glanville, Jennifer L., Pamela Paxton, and Yan Wang. 2016. Social Capital and Generosity: A Multilevel Analysis. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 45 (3): 526–547. Graziano, William G., Meara M. Habashi, Brad E. Sheese, and Renée M. Tobin. 2007. Agreeableness, Empathy, and Helping: A Person × Situation Perspective. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 93 (4): 583–599.

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Herzog, Patricia Snell, and Heather E.  Price. 2016. American Generosity: Who Gives and Why. New York: Oxford University Press. Herzog, Patricia Snell, and Song Yang. 2018. Social Networks and Charitable Giving: Trusting, Doing, Asking, and Alter Primacy. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 47 (2): 376–394. Internal Revenue Service. 2018. Code Section 501(c)3. Exempt Purposes. Retrieved from: https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/charitable-organizations/exempt-purposes-internal-revenue-code-section-501c3 Kanngiesser, Patricia, and Felix Warneken. 2012. Young Children Consider Merit When Sharing Resources with Others. PLoS One 7 (8): e43979. Kılınç, Ramazan, and Carolyn M. Warner. 2015. Micro-Foundations of Religion and Public Goods Provision: Belief, Belonging, and Giving in Catholicism and Islam. Politics and Religion 8 (4): 718–744. Kim, Young-Il, and Jeffrey Dew. 2016. Marital Investments and Community Involvement: A Test of Coser’s Greedy Marriage Thesis. Sociological Perspectives 59 (4): 743–759. Klapwijk, Anthon, and Paul A.M. Van Lange. 2009. Promoting Cooperation and Trust in ‘Noisy’ Situations: The Power of Generosity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 96 (1): 83–103. Knafo, Ariel, and Florina Uzefovsky. 2015. Variation in Empathy: The Interplay of Genetic and Environmental Factors. In The Infant Mind: Origins of the Social Brain, ed. D.W. Haley and M.H. Bornstein. New York: Guilford Press. Knafo, Ariel, Tami Steinberg, and Ira Goldner. 2011. Children’s Low Affective Perspective-Taking Ability Is Associated with Low Self-Initiated pro-Sociality. Emotion 11 (1): 194–198. Knafo-Noam, Ariel, Florina Uzefovsky, Salomon Israel, Maayan Davidov, and Carolyn Zahn-Waxler. 2015. The Prosocial Personality and Its Facets: Genetic and Environmental Architecture of Mother-Reported Behavior of 7-Year Old Twins. Frontiers in Psychology 6 (February): 112. Laks, Andre, and Malcolm Schofield, eds. 1995. Justice and Generosity: Studies in Hellenistic Social and Political Philosophy – Proceedings of the Sixth Symposium Hellenisticum. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Layous, Kristin, Joseph Chancellor, and Sonja Lyubomirsky. 2014. Positive Activities as Protective Factors Against Mental Health Conditions. Journal of Abnormal Psychology 123 (1): 3–12. Leider, Stephen, Markus M. Möbius, Tanya Rosenblat, and Quoc-Anh Do. 2009. Directed Altruism and Enforced Reciprocity in Social Networks. The Quarterly Journal of Economics 124 (4): 1815–1851. LeRoux, Kelly, and Mary K.  Feeney. 2014. Nonprofit Organizations and Civil Society in the United States. New York: Routledge. Li, Yaojun. 2015.The Handbook of Research Methods Applications on Social Capital. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing.

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Li, Yaojun, Anthony Heath, and Fiona Devine. 2015a. Formal and Informal Social Connections in the UK. In The Handbook of Research Methods and Applications on Social Capital, 187–203. Li, Yaojun, Mike Savage, and Alan Warde. 2015b. Social Stratification, Social Capital and Cultural Practice in the UK.  In The Handbook of Research Methods and Applications on Social Capital, 21–39. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing. Li, Yaojun, Neil Smith, and Peter Dangerfield. 2018. Social Trust: The Impact of Social Networks and Inequality. British Social Attitudes 35 (July): 1–25. Lyubomirsky, Sonja, Joseph Chancellor, and Katherine Jacobs. n.d. Lyubomirsky, Sonja Final Report – Ripples of Generosity in the Workplace: The Hedonic and Behavioral Benefits of Giving and Receiving. Riverside: University of California. Maybach, Carol Wiechman. 1996. Investigating Urban Community Needs: Service Learning from a Social Justice Perspective. Education and Urban Society 28 (2): 224–236. McAuliffe, Katherine, Jillian J. Jordan, and Felix Warneken. 2015. Costly Third-­ Party Punishment in Young Children. Cognition 134 (January): 1–10. McCrea, Jennifer, Jeffrey C.  Walker, and Karl Weber. 2013. The Generosity Network: New Transformational Tools for Successful Fund-Raising. New York: Deepak Chopra. McKeever, Brice. 2018. The Nonprofit Sector in Brief 2018: Public Charities, Giving, and Volunteering. National Center for Charitable Statistics. Washington, DC: The Urban Institute. Retrieved from: https://nccs.urban.org/publication/ nonprofit-sector-brief-2018-the-nonprofit-sector-in-brief-2018-public-charitesgiving-and-volunteering McKeever, Brice S., Nathan E. Dietz, and Saunji D. Fyffe. 2016. The Nonprofit Almanac: The Essential Facts and Figures for Managers, Researchers, and Volunteers. 9th ed. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Mikulincer, Mario, Phillip R. Shaver, Omri Gillath, and Rachel A. Nitzberg. 2005. Attachment, Caregiving, and Altruism: Boosting Attachment Security Increases Compassion and Helping. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 89 (5): 817–839. Miller, David. 1999. Principles of Social Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Musick, Marc A., and John Wilson. 2007. Volunteers: A Social Profile. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Ottoni-Wilhelm, Mark, David B. Estell, and Neil H. Perdue. 2014. Role-Modeling and Conversations about Giving in the Socialization of Adolescent Charitable Giving and Volunteering. Journal of Adolescence 37 (1): 53–66. Ottoni-Wilhelm, Mark, Ye Zhang, David B.  Estell, and Neil H.  Perdue. 2017. Raising Charitable Children: The Effects of Verbal Socialization and Role-­ Modeling on Children’s Giving. Journal of Population Economics 30 (1): 189–224. Paxton, Pamela, Nicholas E. Reith, and Jennifer L. Glanville. 2014. Volunteering and the Dimensions of Religiosity: A Cross-National Analysis. Review of Religious Research 56 (4): 597–625.

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Payton, Robert L., and Michael P. Moody. 2008. Understanding Philanthropy: Its Meaning and Mission. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Rapp, Dana. 2002. Social Justice and the Importance of Rebellious, Oppositional Imaginations. Journal of School Leadership 12 (3): 226–245. Salamon, Lester M. 2014. New Frontiers of Philanthropy: A Guide to the New Tools and New Actors That Are Reshaping Global Philanthropy and Social Investing. New York: Oxford University Press. Salamon, Lester M., S.  Wojciech Sokolowski, and Megan A.  Haddock. 2011. Measuring the Economic Value of Volunteer Work Globally: Concepts, Estimates, and a Roadmap to the Future. Annals of Public and Cooperative Economics 82 (3): 217–252. Sandell, Richard, and Eithne Nightingale. 2013. Museums, Equality and Social Justice. London: Routledge. Sebastián-Enesco, Carla, and Felix Warneken. 2015. The Shadow of the Future: 5-Year-Olds, but Not 3-Year-Olds, Adjust Their Sharing in Anticipation of Reciprocation. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 129 (January): 40–54. Simpson, Brent, and Robb Willer. 2015. Beyond Altruism: Sociological Foundations of Cooperation and Prosocial Behavior. Annual Review of Sociology 41 (1): 43–63. Smith, Christian, and Hilary Davidson. 2014. The Paradox of Generosity: Giving We Receive, Grasping We Lose. New York: Oxford University Press. Smith, Christian, and Jonathan P.  Hill. 2009. Toward the Measurement of Interpersonal Generosity (IG): An IG Scale Conceptualized, Tested, and Validated. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame. Swain, James E., and Shao-Hsuan Shaun Ho. 2017. Parental Brain: The Crucible of Compassion. New York: Oxford University Press. Swain, James E., Sara Konrath, Stephanie L.  Brown, Eric D.  Finegood, Leyla B. Akce, Carolyn J. Dayton, and S. Shaun Ho. 2012. Parenting and Beyond: Common Neurocircuits Underlying Parental and Altruistic Caregiving. Parenting: Science & Practice 12 (2/3): 115–123. Turner, Jonathan H. 2016. The Macro and Meso Basis of the Micro Social Order. In Handbook of Contemporary Sociological Theory, Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research, ed. Seth Abrutyn, 123–148. Cham: Springer International Publishing. U.S.  Census. 2017. American Community Survey 5-Year Estimate. Retrieved from: www.census.gov/acs/www United Nations. 2013. The State of Global Civil Society and Volunteering: Latest Findings from the Implementation of the U.N. Nonprofit Handbook. United Nations. Retrieved from: http://ccss.jhu.edu/publications-findings/?did=393 ———. 2015. 2015 State of the World’s Volunteerism Report: Transforming Governance. Retrieved from: https://www.unv.org/annual-report-2015/ ———. 2018. 2018 State of the World’s Volunteerism Report: The Thread That Binds. United Nations. Retrieved from: http://unv-swvr2018.org/

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Warneken, Felix. 2013. Young Children Proactively Remedy Unnoticed Accidents. Cognition 126 (1): 101–108. Warneken, Felix, and Emily Orlins. 2015. Children Tell White Lies to Make Others Feel Better. British Journal of Developmental Psychology 33 (3): 259–270. Warner, Carolyn M., Ramazan Kılınç, Christopher W. Hale, Adam B. Cohen, and Kathryn A. Johnson. 2015. Religion and Public Goods Provision: Experimental and Interview Evidence from Catholicism and Islam in Europe. Comparative Politics 47 (2): 189–209. Warner, Carolyn M., Ramazan Kılınç, Christopher W. Hale, and Adam B. Cohen. 2018a. Generating Generosity in Catholicism and Islam. New York: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2018b. Generating Generosity in Catholicism and Islam: Generosity, Public Goods Provision, and Religious Beliefs in Catholicism and Islam: An Experiment. In Generating Generosity in Catholicism and Islam, 67–88. New York: Cambridge University Press. Wiepking, Pamala, and René Bekkers. 2012. Who Gives? A Literature Review of Predictors of Charitable Giving. Part Two: Gender, Family Composition and Income. Voluntary Sector Review 3 (2): 217–245. Wiepking, Pamala, and Femida Handy, eds. 2015. The Palgrave Handbook of Global Philanthropy. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Wike, Richard, and Alexandra Castillo. 2018. Many Around the World Are Disengaged from Politics. Washington, DC: Pew Research Center. Retrieved from: https://www.pewglobal.org/2018/10/17/international-politicalengagement/ Wilcox, W. Bradford, and Jeffrey Dew. 2016. The Social and Cultural Predictors of Generosity in Marriage: Gender Egalitarianism, Religiosity, and Familism. Journal of Family Issues 37 (1): 97–118. Wilhelm, Mark O. 2007. The Quality and Comparability of Survey Data on Charitable Giving. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 36 (1): 65–84. Wilson, John. 2000. Volunteering. Annual Review of Sociology 26 (1): 215–240. World Health Organization, and International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. 2010. Towards 100% Voluntary Blood Donation: A Global Framework for Action. World Health Organization & International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. Retrieved from: http://www.ncbi. nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK305667/ Worts, Diana, Amanda Sacker, and Peggy McDonough. 2010. Falling Short of the Promise: Poverty Vulnerability in the United States and Britain, 1993–2003. American Journal of Sociology 116 (1): 232–271. Zunz, Olivier. 2014. Philanthropy in America: A History  – Updated Edition. Revised ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

CHAPTER 3

The Causes of Generosity: From Attachment to Cultural Solidarity

This chapter focuses on findings from the Science of Generosity project that help to explain why people are generous. The causes of generosity are complex and multiple. There is no one single explanation for why people give in ways that are intended to benefit others. Moreover, causes of giving range across the micro-, meso-, and macro-levels of social life described in Chap. 2. In what follows, causes of generosity are reviewed in ascending order, from the bottom to the top of Fig. 2.5 (see Chap. 2). Namely, this chapter begins with micro-level causes, such as individual genetic composition and social psychological orientations. The next level reviews family causes, and the important role of parents in inheriting generous dispositions, attaching in ways that promote generosity, and socializing generosity through teaching and modeling. Additional interpersonal causes of generosity are then reviewed, focusing on how children learn to give through their interactions with others. Within interpersonal causes are also solicitations to give and the ways that asking another to give causes their increased generosity. Traversing to the meso-level units within the middle of Fig. 2.5, the next set is group and community causes, followed by organizational causes. Last are institutional and social causes. Figure 3.1 visualizes the self as embedded within multiple agents of socialization, including the family, peers, religion, government, media, work, ethnic culture, social groups and clubs, and schools. All these (and more) agents interact with, inform, and ultimately socialize the self. Yet, © The Author(s) 2020 P. S. Herzog, The Science of Generosity, Palgrave Studies in Altruism, Morality, and Social Solidarity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26500-7_3

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Fig. 3.1  Multiple and dynamic agents of socialization. (Source: Author creation)

the self also acts backward upon these socializing agents. This is a dynamic process. Picture this visual as in rapid motion, akin to molecules bouncing around in an active petri dish. Figure 3.1 is essentially a still frame of what is actually an energetic process. Even the boundaries surrounding each of these agents, and the self, are more fluid than depicted. Social forces flow in and out of these porous boundaries. Despite these dynamic processes, it is not possible for any one study to investigate the entire system simultaneously. Studies often and necessarily bound their unit of analysis, typically focusing on one level or another. Sometimes mixed-methods designs that build upon a wealth of prior studies are able to traverse multiple levels in their investigations, or studies over time are able to explore the dynamic processes in tandem. However, typically, researchers must treat their object of investigation as a still frame, to hold constant some aspects of this dynamic process. Such an approach often aids a nuanced and careful understanding of one aspect of the figure. In reality, however, these s­ tudies must be understood as operating within multiplicative and dynamic pro-

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cesses that involve many levels of interaction occurring simultaneously. This underscores the need for a project such as the Science of Generosity, which accumulates knowledge across several studies, allowing a more comprehensive picture of social life to develop across its many and diverse approaches.

Individual Causes This section includes multiple ways of understanding individual-level causes of generosity. The first section summarizes several studies on genetic influences on generosity, focusing especially on the manifestations of donating, sharing, helping, and comforting. The second section includes several findings on social psychological orientations of generosity. While both genetic and social psychological orientations may be socially influenced, the relative stability of these causal factors implies that individuals will be more or less inclined to act generously as a result of their personal dispositions and characteristics. Genetic Causes To study genetic influences on prosocial behavior, Knafo and colleagues investigated a twin study in Israel, as well as conducted a meta-analysis of global twin studies. The primary twin study was called the Longitudinal Israeli Study of Twins (LIST), which sampled same-sex twin pairs from the Jerusalem area, collecting data from each twin, as well as from their mothers (Knafo et  al. 2011). Most of these mothers (93 percent) were Jewish and with slightly above-average education levels, when compared to the general population. There were no known developmental or cognitive disabilities among the participating twins, and thus the sample is taken to represent normative developmental patterns. In the first study, a total of 83 children participated in 43 twin pairs (there was incomplete data for three of the children). Of these participants, about half were between the ages of three and four, while the other half were between five and six. There were slightly more boys than girls included in the study, but no significant gender differences were found in the results for these twins. This study focused on affective perspective taking: the ability of children to identify the emotions felt by a character in a story. Children who were high in this ability were thought to also be high in generous prosocial behavior. In this case, the focus was on manifestations of helping, sharing,

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and comforting. However, counter to the expectation, children who were high in affective perspective taking did not exhibit generous behaviors at a higher rate, at least not compliantly. The researchers studied generous behaviors that were exercised in response to a cue, versus those that were offered voluntarily, as self-­ initiated generosity (Knafo et  al. 2011). While the former, compliant behaviors were unrelated to affective perspective taking, the self-initiated generous behaviors were related. Children with low affective perspective taking only ever exhibited as many as one generous behavior, with many engaging in not a single generous behavior. Alternatively, children with affective perspective-taking abilities engaged in as many as three generous behaviors, with nearly half (47 percent) engaging in at least one generous behavior. Specifically, affective perspective taking—correct identification of emotions felt by story characters—was linked with greater helping, comforting, and sharing. In this case, helping was measured by a child spontaneously picking up an “accidentally” spilled pencil box for the experimenter. Comforting was measured by the child attempting to soothe the experimenter after “hurting” her knee while standing up. Children who shared a snack with the experimenter, who disappointingly “forgot” their own snack, were coded as sharing. Genetically, these generous reactions were found to differ across same-­ sex sibling pairs. For self-initiated generosity, children with affective perspective taking were found to act more prosocially than their twin siblings with low affective perspective-taking abilities. Assuming these twins have relatively similar family contexts, this finding indicates that there may be a genetic component to acting generously to others, insofar as ability to effectively assume the perspective of others can map genetically in distinct ways, even within sibling pairs. Additionally, this study indicates that different causal mechanisms are operative for compliant generosity, as compared to voluntary generosity. While it may be necessary to ask children to comply with generous requests early in their development processes, in order for children to learn to be generous, it appears that perspective taking is a key cause of generosity only when children are able to initiate their own generosity in response to a perceived need. In a second study based on this same LIST twin sample, Knafo and colleagues more specifically investigated the potential genetic and inherited aspects of generosity. To do so, they studied 98 identical and fraternal twin pairs who were all about three and a half years old, for a total of 158 twins, upon which the researchers were able to obtain genetic data: phenotypes

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based upon DNA analyses (Avinun et al. 2011). Of these, 56 twins were identical twins (28 monozygotic pairs), and 102 twins were fraternal twins (51 dizygotic pairs). This study had slightly more females than males (seven more males), but again no gender differences were found. The manifestation of generosity in this study was akin to charitable giving. Given the young age of the participants, sticker charts symbolically replaced money as the donative source. Children were read an interactive story with a character who gave several sticker charts to the child participant, and the experimenter then asked the child whether he or she wanted to donate any of these stickers to a child that they did not know, who they were told was not read the story and did not receive any stickers of their own. Children elected whether or not to give any or all of their stickers and placed donated stickers in an envelope for the experimenter to take. The target gene of interest for this study has been found to be a key aspect of social cognition, which may be linked to autism susceptibility. The gene is referred to as arginine vasopressin receptor 1A, with an acronym of AVPR1A (Avinun et al. 2011). This cognition gene is often linked to the presence of social skills generally, and, in this study, the researchers focused on its potential connection to prosocial skills. In particular, the expectation was that children who are carries of the gene would donate stickers to unknown children at a lower rate than children who are not carriers of this gene. This expectation was supported, with a finding of gene-carriers being four times less likely to donate more than one sticker chart to unknown children with no stickers, as compared to non-carrier children. This finding holds even when comparing fraternal twins to identical twins, meaning that twins raised in similar family contexts differ in donative behavior, based on a genetic characteristic. The key cause in this case is being a carrier of a gene linked to lower social skills, which is also associated with decreased propensity to donate stickers to a fellow child with no stickers. The third study resulting from the LIST twin sample focused on the over-time dynamics in tracking the same participants longitudinally (Avinun and Knafo 2012). A total of 1636 twin families participated in the sample, tracking participants from ages three and a half to five, six, and seven. Over time, a confluence of genetics, parenting styles, and peer interactions were found to influence generosity. Moms with genetic compositions as seven-repeat allele carriers had greater sensitivity of responsiveness to children, which fostered a more generous social context for children as they developed. Coupled with this was the child’s own genetic

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composition as inclined toward greater or lesser generous behavior toward others. Compounding these genetic and environmental causes, children who had more sociability with peers had greater generosity, especially when high degrees of similarity in twin pairs fostered closeness. One key takeaway from these findings is that life-course development is a dynamic process that includes both stability and change. Individuals are profoundly influenced by their genetic compositions, but central social interactions couple with these genetic propensities over time to foster greater tendencies to be generous to others. These durable aspects of generosity are linked in what Knafo and colleagues identify in a fourth study as a “prosocial personality” (Knafo-­ Noam et  al. 2015). The five facets of this prosocial personality are: empathic concern, sharing, kindness, helping, and social concern. Longitudinally studying 183 twin pairs in the LIST sample, mothers rated their children’s prosociality at the age of seven. Correlations between twin prosociality ratings were compared across identical and fraternal twins. Identical twins had significantly greater similarity across all prosocial facts, compared to fraternal twins. Specifically, similarity for identical twins was nearly four times greater for sharing (monozygotic  =  0.72, dizygotic = 0.19), more than three times greater for social concern (monozygotic = 0.63, dizygotic = 0.17), more than one and a half times greater for kindness (monozygotic  =  0.81, dizygotic  =  0.60), more than 54 times greater for helping (monozygotic = 0.54, dizygotic = 0.01), and nearly 4 times greater for empathic concern (monozygotic  =  0.78, dizygotic = 0.20). Kindness showed the highest degree of environmental influence, with fraternal twins evidencing a high similarity on this facet. Alternatively, helping showed the lowest degree of environmental influence or highest degree of genetic influence in high identical twin similarity and low fraternal twin similarity. Nevertheless, in a factor analysis, all five of these facets load on to a single factor, providing support for an underlying, latent characteristic of a prosocial personality. Figure  3.2 displays the results of this multivariate analysis of common factors and common pathways, displaying the genetic and social environmental contributions for each facet. For example, Fig. 3.2 shows that sharing accounts for 56 percent of the variance in the common prosociality factor, whereas social concern and empathic concern each account for 53 percent of the variance, then helping at 46 percent, and kindness at 25 percent of the variance in the prosociality factor. Within those facets, empathic concern shows the highest genetic contribution,

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Fig. 3.2  Result of multivariate pathways of genetic and environmental effects on prosociality in Knafo-Noam et  al. (2015, p.  6). (Reprinted from Knafo-Noam et al. 2015. Permission to reprint granted under the Creative Commons License (CC BY 4.0). Frontiers in Psychology copyright statement: https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/copyright-statement; CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/. Note from Source: “Rectangles indicate observed scores on prosociality facets. Rounded shapes indicate the common prosociality factor and the variance components estimates. G = heritability and E = non-shared environment (and error) contributions to the common factor. For each observed score unique variance components are also estimated, for which g = genetic; c = shared environment; e = non-shared environment (and error) contributions to the unique variance of each observed score. Values in parentheses are 95% confidence intervals. Values within the square root sign are squared standardized paths and represent the percentage of variance accounted for by the variance component. Values on paths from the common factor to the observed score represent loading of the latent common factor on the observed score (values within the square root sign indicate the proportion of the variance accounted for by the latent common factor)”

with 38 percent of empathic variance due to genetic similarity, as compared to 10 percent of empathic variance due to social environment. Social concern, sharing, and helping have the next highest genetic contributions, with 29 percent, 27 percent, and 24 percent, respectively, of the variance. However, all of these facets also have higher environmental influence than empathic concern, with 32 percent environmental variance in helping, 20 percent in social concern, and 16 percent in sharing. Kindness has the ­lowest genetic contribution, with 11 percent of the variance. Only 16 per-

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cent of the kindness variance is due to non-shared environment, but a high 44 percent is due to shared environmental variance. Genetics and environment mingle in causing generosity. In a final project publication, Knafo and colleagues offer a meta-analysis of global twin studies (Knafo and Uzefovsky 2015). In this summative piece, empathy is found to underlie generous behaviors. Empathy is defined by Knafo and Uzefovsky (2015; p. 97) as “experiencing an affective state that is partially congruent with that of another person (e.g., Decety and Jackson 2004; Preston and de Waal 2002; Spinrad et  al. 2006).” This affective congruence is part of what makes people uniquely human. Lacking empathy underlies social and developmental impairments, such as autism. In terms of how normative developmental processes unfold for empathy, children as young as two years have been found to exhibit joint attention, meaning they coordinate their interactions with another person. This develops into the ability to put one’s self into another’s shoes, to imagine or simulate their circumstances. Once empathy is strongly developed, people are able to experience “emotional resonance,” which is emotively akin to violins echoing one another in musical harmony. As young people mature, the innate emotive response of empathy is thought to develop into a more cognitively regulated differentiation of self and other, and there is evidence of growing emotional regulation and increasing sociocognitive abilities (Knafo and Uzefovsky 2015). Empathy is also thought to increase as young people mature from babies into older children. While there is a strong genetic basis to an empathic disposition, social learning continues throughout the life course. Parenting, schooling, and peering, all contribute to the degree to which people more fully exercise their empathic capabilities. In particular, parents can teach coping strategies, and schools can teach empathy engendering programs. Peers who exhibit high empathy can also relationally influence young people to be more empathic. Yet, the genetic component remains strong, with twin studies finding that about one-third (35 percent) of empathy is explained by genetic factors, and only about 2 percent explained by environment. In summary, Knafo and Uzefovsky (2015, p.  113) offer this overview statement: The relative contributions of genetics and the environment vary by kind of empathy (affective and cognitive), by age, and by children’s emotional symptoms. Genetic effects are stronger in low-risk environments, and ­parenting is more strongly related to observed empathy in children with a specific genetic

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heritage. The picture is of a complex, dynamic process, where genes, environmental risks, parenting, and age interact in affecting individual differences in empathy.

Continuing to understand the ways that nature and nurture interact in explaining individual causes of generosity, the next section addresses other social psychological orientations. Social Psychological Orientations Further considering individual-level factors, several social psychological orientations can guide how individuals interact interpersonally and participate, or not, in groups and organizations. With regard to social psychological orientations that impact generosity, researchers in the Science of Generosity project (Herzog and Price 2016) considered more than 100 different indicators that group within the following six categories: personality and wellbeing (such as depression, behavioral anxiety, sensation seeking, and extrovert-introvert), values and morals (such as materialism, consumerism, and moral relativism), life dispositions (such as having a gratitude outlook, prosperity perspective, and sucker aversion), relational styles (such as relational attachment, empathy, hospitality, and considering people to be all one human family), social milieu (such as experience of caring ethos, selflessness, belief in reciprocity, and trust in generosity systems), and charitable giving (such as responsibility to be generous, willingness to give more, awareness of giving options, and knowing about generosity outcomes). Conducting a factor analysis of these many indicators, seven principal factors emerged: social solidarity, life purpose, collective consciousness, social trust, prosperity outlook, acquisition seeking, and social responsibility. Of these, high prosperity outlook (“there is plenty to go around”) and low acquisition seeking (“life is for the taking”) orientations are the strongest predictors of giving money. Social solidarity (“we’re all in it together”) and collective conscious (“we are all here to help each other”) orientations are also strong predictors of giving money. In terms of having an orientation to be a generous person, social solidarity is the strongest predictor, then come collective conscious, prosperity outlook, and social responsibility (“we are all our brother’s or sister’s keepers”). Based on the previous set of studies, it is likely that these orientations are formed through a combination of genetic and environmental factors. Once formed, these

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orientations appear to be guiding influences to act in generous ways, or not. People describe these orientations as helping to explain their individual inclinations toward generosity. These individual-level orientations highlight the ways that people have personal agency in exercising the degree to which they want to engage in generous actions. Embedded within this agency are personal values that prospectively guide social actions (e.g. Hitlin and Piliavin 2004). Importantly, self-transcendence is a value that can lead people to focus beyond the self in pursuing the wellbeing of others. Indeed, in a national study in Italy with 1324 participants ranging from 20 to 90 years, Caprara and Steca (2007) found that self-transcendence directly influenced prosocial behavior, as well as contributed indirectly through its effect on selfand social efficacy. Namely, people with greater self-transcendence were more likely to regulate their negative emotions and capable of expressing positive affect (self-efficacy), as well as more able to sense the feelings of another and be aware of their need for emotional support (social efficacy), both of which in turn contributed to expressing greater empathy. Combined, self-transcendence and social-self efficacy contributed to an average of more than half (55 percent) of the variance in exhibiting generous behaviors. Thus, social psychological orientations are another important individual cause of generosity, which couple with genetic factors in explaining individual-level reasons why people are inclined to act generously, or are not so inclined. The next section moves beyond these individual-­level explanations to consider other social causes.

Family Causes Shifting up the pyramid from individual-level causes, families are also importantly causal in shaping generosity. Often, family causes are thought to be downward-directing, in a focus on the ways that parents shape the generosity behaviors of children. Indeed, many studies in the Science of Generosity Initiative focus on this direction of influence. Additionally, Brown and colleagues investigated the ways that parenting itself can cause generosity, finding that the same caregiving system that activates in parent neural circuitry, in reacting to a crying baby, is also activated in other non-­ family-­based generous and compassionate responses (Brown et  al. n.d.; Swain et al. 2012; Swain and Ho 2017). In particular, donating activates four areas of the brain: the bilateral anterior insula, the ventral medial ­prefrontal cortex, the posterior superior temporal cortex, and the bilateral

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anterior insula (Hare et al. 2010). Moreover, the insula is also activated in making charitable donation decisions (Lutz et al. 2008). All of these systems are linked with feelings of love, kindness, and general caregiving, indicating that parental caregiving systems can activate generous responses. Brown and colleagues stated: “The human capacity to form enduring social relationships is central to individual and collective mental health in a society” (Swain et al. 2012, p. 115). Also focusing on family causes, Gillath and colleagues studied the effect of parental attachment on child generosity (Mikulincer et al. 2005; Gillath et al. 2012). Attachment security refers to the sense that one is worthy of being loved and that people will be there when needed. While attachment security is often formed in early childhood, it can have long-lasting effects later in life, as young people emerge into adulthood. Ninety Israeli undergraduates and 90 American undergraduates participated in an experiment that was designed to prime attachment security. When secure attachments were primed, young people expressed more compassion and were more willing to help a woman in need, across both societies. These scholars assert that: On the basis of an attachment perspective, we believe that a sense of attachment security allows a redistribution of attention and resources, away from self-protection and toward other behavioral systems, including the caregiving system, which operates through such mechanisms as empathy and compassion (Mikulincer et al. 2005, p. 836).

Moreover, priming attachment anxiety induced negative emotions, and attachment avoidance decreased generosity (Gillath et al. 2012). Increasing attachment security again caused greater generosity, this time net of preexisting attachment, meaning that even if one did not have a strong attachment during childhood, that feeling securely attached as an emerging adult can still promote greater generosity. In this sense, generosity is malleable throughout the life course. Also finding malleability for developing generosity, Ottoni-Wilhelm and colleagues found that children and teens respond to the role-­modeling and teaching efforts of their parents. Focusing on the third tier of Fig. 2.5, socialization, these researchers theorized that generous actions are grounded within socialization that leads children to internalize the value of acting prosocially. Drawing upon longitudinal survey data with 1244 youth who were 12–18 years old, Ottoni-Wilhelm et al. (2014) studied

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the effects of different parenting styles. In particular, they were interested in testing the utility of theories regarding authoritative versus authoritarian styles of parenting. While not finding a strong link between these theorized parenting styles, particular parenting practices mattered. For instance, parents role-modeling volunteering resulted in 11 percent more volunteering by youth. Similarly, parents talking about giving caused 8 percent more youth to give. Additively, parents who both role-modeled volunteering and talked about giving caused youth to have a 47 percent greater probability of acting generously. Interestingly, giving role-modeling was more effective for girls (20 percent greater giving for girls, compared to 8 percent for boys), while talking had a stronger effect for boys (16 percent greater giving for boys, compared to 7 percent for girls). In summary, “parents strongly influence the kinds of prosocial behavior exhibited by a wider fraction of the population” (Ottoni-Wilhelm et al. 2014, p. 62). In a second study, drawing upon longitudinal survey data with 1506 children and youth, aged 5–19 and 10–19, Ottoni-Wilhelm and colleagues found that parents verbally socializing children raised their giving probability by 14 percent (Ottoni-Wilhelm et al. 2017). Parents role-­modeling giving also contributed to a 6 percent increase in child generosity. These findings further underscore the importance of nurturing generosity, especially throughout the life-course progression from childhood through adolescence. Moreover, once sibling fixed effects are included, these generosity rates fell, with talking reducing to a 3 percent gain, and the effect of rolemodeling zeroing. Stated differently, shared family context appeared to account for the majority of the individual-level variation. Taken together, these studies indicate the significance of social learning, and the strong causal influence of family contexts in fostering generosity over time. Yet, many parents retreated their socialization efforts as teens aged, with 16 percent stopping talking to children about giving. These researchers stated that “our results imply that curtailing conversations causes a large reduction in the probability that a child gives” (Ottoni-­Wilhelm et  al. 2017, p.  222). Thus, families are important in causing generosity.

Interpersonal Causes This section includes multiple ways of understanding interpersonal causes of generosity. The first sub-section involves several studies on children learning to give through social influences outside of the family, focusing

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especially on the manifestations of sharing and helping. The second sub-­ section includes several findings on the power of asking, when interpersonal solicitations invite generosity, with manifestations of generosity including charitable giving, volunteering, and blood donation. Children Learning to Give Continuing a focus on interpersonal causes of generosity through social learning, Warneken and colleagues found that children also learn to give from other adults and peers, outside of the family. For example, Kannigiesser and Warneken (2012) studied 36 children that were three and five years old. In an experimental design, these children interacted with a large hand puppet that matched the gender of the child, a relative peer of sorts. The puppet and child played a game together that involved collecting coins. During the orientation to the game, the puppet adjusted their timing to match the child’s, resulting in the puppet and child collecting the same number of coins, with no merit-based difference in distribution. Subsequently, in the trial rounds, one condition had the puppet collect more coins than the child, while the other condition had the puppet collect fewer coins than the child. Afterward, the experimenter gave the child several stickers and asked the child to distribute the stickers while the experimenter and puppet left the room, then the number of stickers awarded to the puppet were counted. The findings are that children in the condition in which they earned more coins than the puppet kept their stickers more than the condition in which they earned fewer coins than the puppet, for both age groups. In a second set of experiments with a total of 108 children, all two years old, experimenters dropped a can and varied whether the experimenter acknowledged the dropped can, as in the control condition, or did not acknowledge the dropped can, treatment condition (Warneken 2013). The goal was to see whether children would voluntarily attempt to help the experimenter, by informing the experimenter of the dropped can, or by picking the can up to put back on the table. The findings were that the children in the control condition never attempted to tell the experimenter about the dropped can, who had looked at the can and blatantly ignored it. Alternatively, in the treatment condition, the children tried to tell and help with the problem. This generous helping behavior increased with age, such that one-third of the 22-month-old children helped, whereas one-half of the 25-month-old children helped, and three-quarters of the

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28-month-old children helped. A replication with a slight modification of this experiment revealed that even more two-year-old children helped when it was more obvious that the can dropping was accidental, with papers being moved resulting in the can dropping rather than direct action by the experimenter. These experiments demonstrate that young children can exhibit generosity, even without being prompted to do so, or especially in the absence of a social cue to help. Alternatively, a third set of experiments revealed that children could also be encouraged to lie, when social learning cues indicated that this would be a way to make others feel better (Warneken and Orlins 2015). These “white lies” can be viewed as other-oriented actions that are mistakenly perceived to be generous by children. These experiments involved 80 children, spanning age groups of 5-year-old, 7- to 8-year-old, and 10- to 11-year-old children. In this case, the prop was a set of drawings, which were marked as good and bad renderings of their subject. During introductory trials, the children were asked to sort these drawings based on whether they were deemed to be good or bad renderings, and the children correctly sorted the drawings. Next, the children went through test trials in which children either experienced a sad or a neutral condition. The sad condition had the artist say she was sad because she worked hard to make the drawing, and the experimenter said that maybe the child could do something to make the artist feel better. In the neutral condition, the artist said she was fine and did not care about the bad drawing. This was then followed by modeling rounds, in which an experimenter showed the child pictures and told the child that she was going to make the artist feel better by putting a bad drawing in a good pile. Then, there were more trial rounds such as the pre-modeling phase. Children were observed to see how they categorized the drawings after the modeling phase. The findings are that about two-­ thirds of children told a white lie in order to make the sad artist feel better. White lies were higher after the modeling phase, and were also higher among older children than younger children. About half of 5-year-old children told white lies in the sad condition, compared to less than three-­ quarters of 7- to 8-year-old children, and an even three-quarters of 10- to 11-year-old children. When conceived of as a generous act, this set of experiments further underscores that children can learn to be generous to others, especially when prompted. However, it also raises concerns about the ways children can be taught to act unvirtuously if misguided into viewing an antisocial act, such as lying, as a prosocial action.

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In a fourth set of experiments, a total of 72 children participated— about half were 3-year-old and the other half 5-year-old children (SebastiánEnesco and Warneken 2015). This set of experiments was focused on generosity manifested as cooperation and reciprocity, and the experimenters were interested in whether children need to have developed certain cognitive capacities in order to engage in sharing. This experiment involved children interacting with a setup that is represented in Fig. 3.3, with a relatively unattractive red machine shown on the left side of the figure, separated by two tables with child and puppet chairs facing each other. On the right side of the figure is the considerably more attractive green machine, which has fancier decorations that are aesthetically ­pleasing to children, and which made musical noises as balls traversed it, in comparison to the relatively boring roll of a ball in the red machine. Children at Table 1 could play with the red machine, and children at Table  2 could play with the green machine. Upon conclusion of the experiment, children were given balls to enter into the machine.

Fig. 3.3  Schematic drawing of the Sebastián-Enesco and Warneken (2015, p.  46) Sharing Task. (Reprinted from Sebastián-Enesco and Warneken (2015), with permission from Elsevier. Permission granted through the International Association of STM Publishers. Note from Source: “Children were donors at Table 1, and the puppet was a donor at Table 2. The green machine corresponds to the high-­attractive game, and the red machine corresponds to the low-attractive game. For the control condition, the green machine was removed from Table 2 and instead two sheets of paper and some pens were placed on Table 2. The same basic setup was used for the training phase and the DoG task. (For interpretation of the references to colour in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.)” URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/ pii/S002209651400157X)

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The first task was delayed gratification, in which the children had to decide if they wanted to use their balls immediately in the red machine or wait until later for the green machine. This was followed by a sharing task, during which children were, first, the donors at the green machine and allotted balls to a puppet. The puppet and the children then moved to the red machine and switched roles, with the puppet allocating balls to the child, in the treatment condition. In the control condition, the puppet and the child drew on paper, and thus the puppet never allocated balls to the child. The results are that children overwhelmingly preferred the green machine, with nearly three-quarters of 3-year-old and nearly all of 5-year-­ old children preferring the green over the red machine. For delayed gratification, the older children were better at saving balls for the green machine than the younger children. In sharing, the 3-year-olds split their balls fairly evenly between themselves and the puppet, regardless of treatment or control. Alternatively, the 5-year-olds split their balls fairly evenly in the control group, but shared their balls with the puppet significantly more in the treatment group. Thus, older children were more likely to share. Moreover, these children were also better at delaying gratification. In summary, it seems that delayed gratification capacities may need to develop in order for children to exhibit generosity, manifested as sharing. A fifth set of experiments studied the inverse of generosity, selfishness (McAuliffe et al. 2015). A total of 96 children participated, with one-third of 5-year-old and two-thirds of 6-year-old children. In this case, the experimenters were interested in whether children would be willing to pay a cost in order to punish others for allocating candy selfishly. Children could accept or reject unequal allocations of candy, and these child participants were told that their decisions would affect the rewards that real peers would receive. The 6-year-old children were more likely to reject unequal distributions of candy than were the 5-year-old children. Younger children were especially unlikely to reject unequal distributions when they had to sacrifice their own candy to do so. In this same study, a second experiment with new 6-year-old children only reversed the balance of unequal distributions, such that children either received equal distributions or generous helpings of candy. Both sets of older children were unlikely to reject equal distributions, suggesting comparability across the two experiments. However, the older children in the second experiment were considerably less likely to reject generously unequal distributions than selfishly unequal distributions. Yet, some children did still punish the generously unequal distributions, even

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when it was costly to them personally. Combined, these experiments show that children gain an increasing awareness of equitable distributions from five to six years old, and that older children are more bothered by inequity than younger children, even in their favor. In a sixth and final set of experiments from this project, a total of 317 children were studied, with about half from India and the other half from the United States (Blake et al. 2016). The U.S. children were based in an urban city, whereas the children in India were based in a rural village. The children were all between three and eight years old. Both sets of children watched their parents allocate candy. The control group allocated their pieces behind a privacy screen, unviewable by their children. A stingy prompt watched their parents keep nine pieces and donate one candy, while a generous prompt watched their parents keep only one candy and donate nine pieces of candy. For the U.S. children, the stingy prompt was highly effective, causing children to be stingier with their candy allocation than in the control, and this was true for all age groups. However, the giving prompt had no effect, also true for all age groups. Alternatively, for the children in India, both the stingy and giving prompts were effective. For the children in India, both the stingy and generous models were effective only for children who were five years and older. The experimenters deduce that this difference in India is attributable to a cultural explanation, whereby children in India are more apt to conform to parental standards. Conversely, American children are inclined to act in self-interested ways or not conform at all. In summary, children can learn to give from non-­ familial sources, as well as from families. Importantly, causal mechanisms continue to operate in fostering generosity throughout childhood and into adolescence, meaning that generosity is a malleable quality that can be continuously caused by a number of interpersonal interactions. In the next section, studies on another form of interpersonal interactions are reviewed: asks for generosity by known and unknown others. The Power of Asking: By Unknown Others Focusing on the fourth tier in Fig. 2.5, communications are important in causing generosity. As reviewed in the preceding studies, people give from their own accord, and in response to childhood and life-course developmental influences. People also give when called upon to be generous by others, making asking a powerful causal mechanism. In the Science of Generosity research, Andreoni and colleagues investigated the power of

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asking. Viewing giving as an inherently social act, these researchers were intrigued with the ways that solicitations to give can overcome tendencies to act selfishly (Andreoni and Rao 2011). Both hypotheses in this study derive from theoretical expectations regarding the importance of communication in affecting generosity, expecting that: communication mediates altruism and creates empathy. To study this, the experimenters invited a total of 278 participants to play a typical “dictator game”: an experimental design that asks participants to allocate monetary units and make decisions about (dictate) how much money is donated to a recipient. In a variant of the traditional implementation of this approach, these researchers asked participants to communicate with each other via written messages (Andreoni and Rao 2011). One group of recipients was asked to write a message before allocation to request that the donor share their resources generously. Another group of recipients was asked to write a request, and then—after allocation—the donor explained their decisions. There were also two groups for donors. In one group, donors sent a message to recipients along with their allocation decision, and in a second group, the donors sent messages with potential allocation amounts, which were subject to change after the donor received a written response from the recipient, then allocation decisions. In all cases, social interaction through communication augmented generosity, and there were variations in the kind of communication and its effect on giving levels. For example, the donor only explaining resulted in the lowest giving rates, in essence providing donors with a way to rationalize fairly low giving levels. Alternatively, two-way communication—with donors offering an initial allocation, recipients replying and requesting a different amount, and donors adjusting their donations in response to this communication—fostered the greatest generosity. In fact, two-way communication fostered four times more generosity than donor explanations alone. Thus, asking within the context of interpersonal communication caused greater generosity. Following up on this initial set of findings, these researchers conducted a second experiment that focused on empathy as a potential causal mechanism explaining the effectiveness of two-way communication causing interpersonal generosity. In this experiment, all participants completed forms to serve as donors and as recipients, thereby experiencing each other’s roles prior to beginning the allocation portion of the experiment. Subsequently, participants were randomly assigned to their actual roles as either donors or recipients. Only the one-way communication groups were included in this second experiment, with some recipients asking prior

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to allocations and, in other cases, the donors being allowed to explain their giving decisions. In all cases, the participants in this second experiment were more generous than the control group in the first experiment, indicating that priming empathy by serving in each other’s roles fostered generosity, across the board. Additionally, selfishness was eliminated in the explaining condition, with the empathy enhancement. The empathy enhancement coupled with asking produced the greatest generosity, but the effect of communication was considerably smaller in this second experiment, further underscoring the importance of empathy. The findings indicate that interpersonal interactions, in the form of two-way communication, are important because it creates empathy, which in turn, fosters generosity. Likewise, serving in each other’s roles—perspective taking— also catalyzes empathy, which also in turn fosters generosity. In this way, asking itself can be viewed as a form of generosity, as the asker is sharing their affiliation to a charitable cause and spreading an empathic response to this need among others. Apologizing for asking diminishes the effectiveness of the ask, whereas explaining the need for the ask augments empathy and diminishes a propensity to selfishly excuse oneself from needing to give. Much like hearing calls to give evokes generosity, asking calls a person to respond to the humanity of a fellow being and helps to overcome self-focused tendencies to keep resources, causing greater generosity. One way to understand these findings is that people act relatively selfishly, if left to their own devices. However, social interaction—even in the form of fairly minimal communication—profoundly overrides these selfish tendencies. Talking to all promotes giving, and asking provides powerful social lubrication for generous actions. Especially profound is taking the role of another: being the asker promotes greater giving when asked. Continuing to study the power of the ask in a second study, Andreoni and colleagues moved out of the laboratory to conduct a natural field experiment with passersby entering a grocery store around the holidays, with a Salvation Army bell-ringer present to ask for giving (Andreoni et al. 2017). Data were collected on 17,622 passes, which is likely about 8811 people coming and going from the store. The puzzle continues to be understanding why people give, and it is especially important to understand why this is puzzling for economists. Most economic approaches are premised on rational choice theory, which posits that people are self-­ maximizers who calculate costs and benefits to make self-interested decisions. Giving does not appear to fit neatly within this theory, and thus

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economists posit a “warm glow” to expand the utility of rational choice theory. The idea is that the warm feelings experienced by giving ultimately benefit the giver, and thus lessen or offset the costs of giving resources away to others. The researchers state: “humans have a great capacity to be generous,” (p. 625) and continue that warm glow giving occurs because “individuals wish to maintain self-images as fair and moral people” (p. 626). What happens, then, when people encounter asks that confront their self-images and force giving in order to maintain their generous sense of self? The researchers find several ask responses: some people go out of their way to encounter the ask, other people attempt to passively avoid the ask but will give when asks are direct, and yet other people go out of their way to avoid being asked (Andreoni et al. 2017). Specifically, the experimenters varied whether the bell-ringer passively rang the bell in silence or more actively made eye contact with passersby and directly asked for donations. The researchers then studied the traffic at each door to monitor natural reactions to the asks. Findings indicate four primary solicitation reactions. First, solicitor silence had no impact on giving or avoidance of asks. Second, having solicitors at both store doors doubled the number of givers and the amount given. Third, solicitors directly asking for donations increased giving rates by nearly half (45 percent increase) and giving amounts by more than half (69 percent more). Specifically, donations averaged to $0.30 per minute with silent solicitation, compared to $1.00 per minute with direct asks at both doors. Fourth, if avoiding the ask was easy, about a third of passersby chose to go to the other door, which did not have a verbal asker, to avoid giving. Indeed, avoiding was so unexpectedly high that it turned out the store had a third entrance that was unbeknownst to the researchers. Figure 3.4 shows a picture of the store, with arrowed numbers one and two indicating the primary entrances to the store, which were the focus of the study. The third arrow on the left side of the picture indicates an unmanned door that led to the store recycling area. This was not a proper entrance to the store, and the experimenters did not begin with this door in mind. As an aside, this fact underscores why natural field experiments are less controllable than laboratory experiments. Yet, it also highlights how natural field experiments result in greater external validity by allowing for the true “messiness” of social life. People cannot be fully controlled, and natural field experiments (and other non-laboratory data collection modes) allow people to surprise researchers with their actual behaviors.

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Fig. 3.4  The power of the ask store studied in Andreoni and Rao (2011, p. 631). (Republished with permission of the University of Chicago Press, from Andreoni et  al. (2017). Permission conveyed through Copyright Clearance Center, Inc. License # 510469058. Note from Source: “Doors 1 and 2 were the main entrances, while door 3 was the side ‘recycling’ door.”)

In this case, the researchers discovered that some people were so willing to go out of their way to avoid solicitations, that they found this other door and traipsed through recycling waste too (Andreoni et  al. 2017). Notably, 871 people avoided the asks at the first door by diverting to the third door. When solicitors were located at both doors, this increased to 901 third-door diverters. Yet, these are both in the silent solicitor conditions. When solicitors also directly asked for gifts, fewer people diverted to the third door: 867 with one-door asking, and 853 with two-door asking. Thus, these researchers were able to quantify avoiding, finding that ­one-­quarter of traffic drops in the presence of two-door asking, and about one-third drops in the presence of one-door asking. In essence, people will go out of their way if it is easy, but in the presence of having to go further out of their way, many will acquiesce to the ask. This accounts for the fewer avoiders when both doors had askers. Nevertheless, some people will go even further out of their way to find that third door. This indicates that some people avoid the psychological cost of saying no, and the loss to their self-image as a good and moral person, by changing their door entry, in an effort to avoid the solicitation. That said, others respond to asks to

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give, and the net gain of augmented solicitation indicates the effectiveness of directly asking. In summary, “asking, it seems, is both aversive and effective” (p. 651). Interestingly, in a related study, DellaVigna et al. (2013) studied door solicitations and focused on gender differences. They found that women and men were equally generous in response to solicitations, except when it was relatively easy to avoid the ask. When easy to avoid asks, women avoided more than men. Connecting to the prior study, perhaps this is because women are especially responsive to interpersonal solicitations to give and need to go out of their way to avoid these interpersonal interactions calling them to give in ways that they otherwise do not choose. Regardless, these studies raise questions about potential tradeoffs between short-term and long-term generosity gains. Direct asks help raise short-­ term generosity, but if solicitations cause discomfort, then generosity may suffer in the longer term. The Power of Asking: By Known Others The previous set of studies focused on the power of asking by unknown others, when fundraisers solicit donations. Also important are asks for giving that occur through known interpersonal connections. This is the focus of the next set of studies. In studying the network of people that an individual feels close to, a Science of Generosity survey of 1997 Americans revealed that people who had at least one giver within their close-to network have 1.68 greater odds of giving than those who do not have a giver within their close social network (Herzog and Yang 2018). Additionally, people with someone in their close network who asks them to give have 1.71 greater odds of giving than those without a solicitation to give within their close network. Notably, giving is best predicted by “Alter 1”—the first person that survey respondents listed, and theoretically, the person whom they feel closest to within their network. When one’s closest contact is a giver, a person has 1.54 greater odds of being a giver. Likewise, when the closest contact asks for giving, the person has 1.68 greater odds of being a giver. Cumulatively, when one’s closest contact is a giver and also asks for giving, a person has 2.52 greater odds of being a giver than when one’s closest contact neither givers nor solicits giving. Continuing a focus on the interpersonal relational factors involved in generosity, a second study from the Science of Generosity research investigated the power of network recruitment (Beyerlein and Bergstrand

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2016). The generosity manifestations of interest in this study were volunteering time, donating blood, and taking political action. Survey data were collected from 1997 respondents, and in this case each dyad was the unit of analysis, meaning every possible pair between the survey respondent and their nominated close-to network, resulting in 7721 dyads. For volunteering, friends are more likely to ask people to give when they are close, get together frequently (monthly or more), as well as when both ties are religious, and when the pairs have political discussions with one another. In terms of blood donation, friends are more likely to ask people to give when they live in the same neighborhood, share the same religious congregation, and are a spouse or romantic partner. With taking political action, friends are more likely to ask if the ties get together frequently, and the asking odds are 1.6 times greater with shared political views, and three times greater when ties discuss important political issues. In summary, interpersonal causes are important for explaining why people give. Whether donating money, time, action, or blood, researchers in the Science of Generosity projects found significant effects for interpersonal communications in increasing generosity. Among known friends, modeling giving and asking for donations predict greater generosity. Even interactions with unknown people increase generosity: children learn to give from even brief communications with puppets, and adults respond to strangers standing outside a store and asking for donations. The first section of this chapter highlighted the importance of micro-level causes of generosity, such as genetic dispositions and social psychological orientations. This second section then highlighted how individual-level factors interact with social dynamics. In the following section, more meso-level studies are reviewed, focusing on group, community, and organizational causes.

Group, Community, and Organizational Causes As introduced in Chap. 2, group dynamics can helpfully produce generosity, but groups can also influence participants in ways that are not always positive, in the sense that coercion and conformity are inevitably also aspects of group dynamics. Free riders can also benefit from the collective effort exerted by other group members, leaving active group members with a conundrum: deciding what to do with members who were inactive. In the Science of Generosity research, Andreoni and Gee (2012) studied peer punishment among a group of 60 experiment participants. A dozen

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of these participated at a point in time, within joint group sessions. The premise of the public good game these participants played was this: each individual receives a starting payment of $1, along with an endowment of five tokens. The tokens can be spent in two ways: donated to the public good—which results in all group members receiving $2—or invested privately—which results in only the investor receiving $3. If all participants act selfishly, each will receive $16; if all participants act generously, each gains $41. The results indicate that free riding accumulates within the first ten periods of the game: participants begin by contributing more to the public good, but then accumulate more selfishly over time, as the game proceeds (Andreoni and Gee 2012). After these first ten rounds, a “hired gun” mechanism is imposed. Participants are informed that deductions will be taken from the participant who contributes the least amount. The deduction reduces the worst-contributors gain to be lower than the second-­ worst-­contributors gain. If there is a tie for the lowest contributor, then all worst contributors will be punished equally with this deduction. When this automatic punishment mechanism is introduced, giving to the collective increases from an average of 1.56 tokens to 4.57 tokens, resulting in an increase in earnings from $23.82 to $37.28 per round. Alternatively, a similar game is played, but without the punishment enforced automatically. In this game, participants can choose whether they want to pay money to impose a similar mechanism. This costs about $0.50 per person and can be hired without total group participation: as few as two group members can afford to “hire” the punishment mechanism. The researchers find that people are overwhelmingly willing to pay a cost to induce group punishment, with 85 percent of groups hiring punishment. In summary, group generosity can have a darker underbelly: members can selfishly gain from group generosity without contributing. To rectify this problem, this study finds that group members are willing to collectively impose punishments to minimize selfish free riding. With regard to community-level generosity, Andreoni and colleagues also studied how diversity affects Canadian generosity (Andreoni et  al. 2011). Drawing upon existing studies that established a connection between ethnic diversity and charitable contributions, such that communities with increasing diversity were less likely to support public schools, these researchers investigated private donations. They found that diversity similarly impacted private donations to public goods, such that individuals reduced their charitable contributions on average by about $27 per year

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for every 10 percent increase in neighborhood ethnic diversity. The rate of giving remained unchanged, people who donated previously continued to donate, but the amounts tended to decrease on average. Likewise, a 10 percent increase in religious diversity within neighborhoods also resulted in a $20 per year deduction in amounts donated to charitable causes. The researchers conclude by stating: Our results imply that the recent and continuing demographic changes across North America and Europe may have a significant and sizable impact on charitable services provided through voluntary contributions of individuals. As communities grow more diverse, charity revenues may fall. This raises further public policy concerns, especially in urban areas, as religious and ethnic diversity inevitably grow (p. 21).

In summary, while ethnic and religious diversity is generally desirable for communities, increased diversity can have unintended consequences for collective levels of generosity. Considering diversity instead in terms of economic resources held within communities, Pande and colleagues investigated community impacts of informal microfinancing becoming available within villages in India (Binzel et  al. 2013). While microfinancing has been supported generally as a way to redistribute economic capital to impoverished communities, this study finds that it can have unintended consequences for community generosity. Namely, formal financing tends to supplant informal microfinancing, and over time villagers tend to shift their network investments to people with whom they feel more altruistic. Most importantly, villagers are ultimately less likely to share resources informally among their community networks than they were before the availability of microfinancing. Not all meso-level interactions have this negative underbelly with regard to generosity. As discussed further in Chap. 4, Lyubomirsky and colleagues found that workplaces contribute positive organizational gains toward network generosity. Similarly, Beyerlein (2016) found religious congregations cause net gains to generosity, manifested as blood donations. Analyzing nationally representative survey data from 1997 Americans, he found that 1589 respondents self-reported eligibility to donate blood (about 80 percent of the sample). However, only about one in ten Americans actually donate blood. Thus, this study examined what factors explain who does donate blood, among those who believe they are

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eligible to do so. Figure 3.5 displays the structural equation model that theorized and tested religious mechanisms. In terms of who donates blood, the model in Fig. 3.5 explains 70 percent of who gives. Three primary religious measures are included on the left side of Fig. 3.5: religious service attendance, religious group involvement, and importance of faith. Service attendance relates directly to having a greater number of religious ties (second column from left in Fig. 3.5), which then relates to a greater propensity to be solicited to donate (third column from left in Fig.  3.4), which in turn, relates to donating blood (right side of Fig. 3.5). Additionally, religious ties also contribute to paths with self-efficacy and exposure to helping messages. Tracking these relationships from the far-left side of Fig.  3.5, religious group involvement

Fig. 3.5  Structural equation model for religious effects in Beyerlein (2016). (Reprinted from Beyerlein (2016), by permission of Oxford University Press and the Association for the Sociology of Religion. Permission conveyed through Copyright Clearance Center, Inc. License # 4605481023540

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relates to a greater degree of self-efficacy (second column from left in Fig. 3.5), more religious ties, and greater exposure to helping messages (second column from left in Fig.  3.5). Self-efficacy in turn relates to a greater willingness to donate blood (fourth column from left in Fig. 3.5), which in turn, predicts being a blood donor. Tracking the third path from religious group involvement, exposure to helping messages (second column from left in Fig.  3.5), relates both to hearing messages that “it is more blessed to give than to receive” (third column from left in Fig. 3.5) and to moral norms (fourth column from left in Fig. 3.5). Moral norms refer to people feeling morally responsible to help others in need. Messages also contribute to moral norms, which relates to a willingness to donate blood, which also predicts blood donation). What Fig. 3.5 and its accompanying analyses mean is that people who are religious are significantly more likely to be blood donors, and this religious mechanism operates organizationally. People who are religious are significantly more likely to have ties to others who are religious, and they are also more likely to hear messages that it is good to help others, and better to give than to receive. These organizational exposures compound in channeling religious participants into a greater likelihood of donating blood. In essence, religiosity causes more blood donation because of the indirect and organizational paths through which religious participation increases social exposure to others who donate, ask to donate, call to donate, and believe in donating as morally good. All of these organizational effects accumulate into a greater willingness to donate, and ultimately result in more blood donation.

Institutional Causes Moving to a broader level of generosity causes, this next section addresses social institutions. Social institutions can be understood as a type of social structure, which Smith (2010, pp.  346–347) defined as: frameworks for social interactions and durable patterns of human relations that are generated and reproduced in social interactions, accumulated and transformed historically, expressed through lived bodily practices, defined by culturally meaningful categories, motivated by normative guides, controlled and reinforced by sanctions, and which ultimately promote cooperation and conformity, discourage resistance and opposition, and result in hierarchies of social statuses, which are expressed as social inequalities. These social structures culminate in societies and cultures as a whole, involving interactions among

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multiple social institutions, such as religious, economic, educational, familial, and political institutions. In the Science of Generosity projects, two primary social institutions are studied: religious institutions, especially in interaction with political institutions, and governmental institutions. Religious Institutions In addition to its organizational and personal facets, religion also matters for generosity as a social and political institution. In the Science of Generosity research, Warner and colleagues conducted cross-national comparisons of religions, as it relates to public goods provision. They focused on four countries with majority religions of Catholicism and Islam: Turkey, Ireland, France, and Italy (Warner et al. 2015). Combining experiments with 800 individuals and interviews with 200 individuals, these researchers studied whether participants elected to donate to a “club good,” supporting either a Catholic or Islamic charity, as compared to donating to a more general public good charity, such as UNICEF.  To study the religious effects on donative behaviors, the researchers primed one of six religious constructs, or a control condition about a desk and chair, by asking participants to write an essay on the assigned topic. The six religious constructs were: duty to God, God’s grace, deservedness, normative expectations, human solidarity, and a general concept of religion. First, duty to God focuses on adherence to God’s commandments in Catholicism and obedience to God’s will in Islam; Islam requires zakat and fitr, giving resources to others, and Catholicism requires tithing (Warner et al. 2015). Second, God’s grace refers to living life in a way that loves and honors God, and the idea that God works through people in divine and merciful ways, in both Catholicism and Islam. Third, deservedness emphasizes that other people are in need and deserving of help, again in both Islam and Catholicism. Fourth, religious groups have normative expectations for moral actions, including contributing prosocially to benefit the welfare of others. Fifth, human solidarity in Catholic and Muslim communities are to identify with others, to put one’s self in the shoes of another, to display empathy. Sixth, to compare results to other studies that prompt “religion,” in the abstract and without a specifically named religious concept, the researchers asked generally about religion. The seventh group merely wrote about a desk and chair, to compare writing and reflection without any religious content. The results are that Muslims gave at a higher rate than Catholics, more than triple (Warner et al. 2015). When Catholics were primed with duty

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to God, their giving rate was nearly three times as high (2.6) than Catholics in the control group prime. For religious club giving, none of the primes were significant, and Catholics still gave at a considerably lower rate than Muslims. For public good giving, the primes again had no effect on Muslim giving. However, Catholics responded to primes for God’s grace (3.2 greater odds of giving than control), duty to God (2.9 greater odds), and deservedness (2.7 greater odds of giving than control). The researchers discuss these results and suspect that at least part of the reason that the Muslim giving was not responsive to the primes is because duty to God levels were already considerably higher among Muslim participants, presenting a ceiling effect to the ability of primes to engender giving. Alternatively, the Catholics were low on duty to God and thus had more room to respond. This is supported by the in-depth interviews with each group, during which Catholics repeatedly declared that they did not have a duty to God to help others, whereas the majority of Muslims explained their giving motivations by describing salient duty to God. Thus, priming religiosity generated generosity, for Catholics who began with lower levels of giving than Muslims. Continuing this project in another study, these researchers reported on the results of 218 interviews in the same four countries: France, Ireland, Italy, and Turkey (Kılınç and Warner 2015). The interview format allowed the researchers to learn in greater depth about this duty to God, and they discovered that Catholics did not think that their love from God needed to be earned and thus were less inclined to view their religiosity and giving in terms of a duty. Alternatively, Muslims tended to stress the need to please God and stressed wanting to earn God’s love through good deeds, such as giving. Catholics, rather, stressed their families of origin and school traditions in explaining why they continue to give, as a cultural heritage. While adherents of both religions highlighted the satisfaction they derived from helping communities, Catholics tended to view this as the means and the ends, whereas Muslims emphasized the true ends as the acts of good deeds themselves, regardless of the collective benefits produced. Both groups talked about the importance of developing and fostering social bonds with other members of the community, and that giving or volunteering together strengthened these bonds. Thus, both Catholics and Muslims describe religious institutional causes of generosity, in distinct ways. In a third study from this project, Warner and colleagues theorized which aspects of religiosity are best measured across cultures (Cohen et al. 2017). Drawing upon a long-standing psychological theory on religious

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orientations (Allport and Ross 1967), the Science of Generosity researchers tested the theories of intrinsic and extrinsic religiosity on a religiously diverse sample, including Muslims along with Catholics. Employing confirmatory factor analysis, the researchers find that there are three useful factors: internal religiosity, and two forms of extrinsic religiosity: personal and social. Internal religiosity refers to religious activities that can be done independently, such as reading about religion, privately praying, and living life in a way that is based upon religious beliefs. Personal extrinsic religiosity includes praying to gain relief and protection, religion offering comfort in times of trouble, praying for peace and happiness. Social extrinsic religiosity includes attending religious services because it helps to foster friendship, creates socializing opportunities, and provides time with friends. Ultimately, these studies culminated in a book entitled Generating Generosity in Catholicism and Islam (Warner et al. 2018). In this book, the researchers assert that: “asking questions about how religions prompt and channel prosociality helps us understand the potential of religions to provide social services when the state reduces the scope of its own services” (p. 18). The culmination of findings from a mixed methodology of experiments, interviews, and case studies reveals that the community and togetherness aspects of religiosity are crucial for understanding religious motivations for generosity. This is distinct from a micro-level focus on beliefs, or a meso-level focus on organizational factors. Rather, institutionally, religiosity is also a collective social institution which provides an organizing framework for social interactions, including good deeds designed to benefit others beyond the self. Seen from this perspective, religion is similar to a political institution, in that it organizes personal beliefs in the provision of broader public goods. The next section addresses governmental institutions directly. Governmental Institutions To study the role of government institutions in promoting generosity, Andreoni and Payne (2011a, b) investigated what happens when a government grants funding to organizations for charitable purposes—first in the United States and then in Canada. Do governmental grants increase net generosity, adding to individual donations to make more funding available for charitable purposes; or do governmental grants reduce the need to raise funds, resulting in an equivalent or perhaps even a net loss in available charitable funding? To answer this question, the researchers analyzed U.S. Internal Revenue Service federal tax return data on nonprofit

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revenues and expenses. Beginning with a total sample of more than 40,000 nonprofit organizations, the researchers examined eligibility of these organizations for the purposes of this study, especially considering whether the organization had data reported over time for at least three years of data, as well as whether the organizations had ever received a combination of both government grants and private donations. There was a total of 8062 eligible organizations for this study, having 39,769 observations, with an average of about three-quarters of a million in private donations and nine-­ tenths of a million in government grants. The results indicate that typical charities spend an average about 15 percent of their donation on fundraising, totaling to a little less than a million dollars spent annually on fundraising, on average (Andreoni and Payne 2011a). These fundraising efforts return revenue at a rate of about five to one, meaning for every dollar spent on fundraising, about five dollars of donations are raised. When organizations that receive both government grants and private funding are awarded government grants, their fundraising reduces on average by about 86 percent, meaning they raise about 14 cents less of private funds for each dollar of government grants received. In deducing why this reduction occurs, the researchers find that the major explanation is reduced fundraising efforts on the part of the organization. In fact, individual giving is slightly higher, and thus government grants do not appear to reduce individual-level generosity, but rather they damper meso-level generosity through organizational fundraising. The second study on this topic investigated Canadian data, also drawn from annual tax fillings over multiple years from the Canada Revenue Agency (Andreoni and Payne 2011b). Among the 25,000 possible organizations to include in the analysis, there were 6554 that met eligibility criteria, with 68,146 observations. Four revenue streams were considered: government grants, individual donations, fundraising revenue, and foundation contributions. When government grants were awarded, two of the three other revenue sources decreased. Further confirming the results of the first study, individual donations were negligibly effected, and thus macro-level generosity does not appear to decrease micro-level generosity. However, both forms of meso-level generosity reduced. For every dollar of government grant received, fundraising revenue decreased by about a half dollar and foundation contributions by one-third of a dollar. In terms of the implications of these studies, it is important not to misunderstand these results as showing that governmental grants necessarily reduce generosity. Rather, organizational losses tend to happen, and thus effective policies can consider how to balance grants with this information. For exam-

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ple, government grants could be awarded with requirements for organizations to continue to fundraise, perhaps even matching a portion of the grants received. Even without top-down regulations, nonprofit organizations could themselves self-regulate by continuing concerted efforts to fundraise, even when awarded government grants. Indeed, the results of individual-level generosity indicate that an effective strategy may be for organizations to advertise their receiving government grants as a way potentially to foster trust in the organization. If addressed directly at the meso-level, it may be that individual-level giving could increase as a response to macro-level generosity, resulting in governmental grants contributing to a net overall gain in both public and private sources of funding. These strategies are beyond the purview of these existing data and provide potential implications for practitioners to consider. Another way to view these results is as indicating that the philanthropic sector substitutes for the public sector, in a macro-to-macro-level exchange. In certain senses, philanthropic organizations could be viewed as outsourced governmental activities, in terms of their goal to improve public goods provision. Seen from this lens, government expenditures reduce the need for philanthropic expenditures. This lends support to the ideas that philanthropic funding supplants government contributions and can offset underinvestment in public goods. When government support is readily available, no such supplementing is needed; when government funding is lacking, then philanthropic organizations contribute the difference. The fact that these macro-level changes do not affect micro-level donations further supports the exchange idea, as individual-level donors are unaffected by whether foundations or governments supplement gifts. In summary, both political and religious institutional causes contribute to generosity. While institution-to-institution causes appear to zero out, in the case of government grants, institution-to-individual causes appear to contribute net gain, or have the potential to, at least in terms of the ways that religious institutional resources can be primed to foster greater individual-­ level generosity. More generally, these studies highlight the need to focus on multiple layers of the social force pyramid (Fig. 2.5). No one study alone can necessarily study multiple layers; yet, multiple studies can be accumulated around similar topics to reveal patterns across micro, meso, and macro units. Such an endeavor reveals complexities, but not insurmountable confusion. Realistic practical and policy implications can be derived from each layer of data, and the results of meso-level and macro-level studies reveal fungible mechanisms for creating change in net generosity levels, even with the predispositions of baseline individual-level genetic factors.

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Societal and Cultural Causes At the broadest level of the social force pyramid, societal and cultural causes involve shared values, norms, and beliefs. Within geopolitical boundaries, subcultural dynamics affect generosity through lifestyle choices and patterned preference choices (Bourdieu 1986). For example, in the Science of Generosity projects, Li and colleagues found that social classes, in the form of occupational dynamics, affect relative generosity. In a nationally representative survey of 10,000 respondents across a ten-year time span in Britain and Wales, Li (2015a) found that there is a link between social capital and generosity. Employing a National Statistics Social-economic Classification of occupational status reveals the professional and managerial class to be more engaged in generous activities, in terms of volunteering, informal helping, and charitable giving. Specifically, about three-quarters of the professional and managerial class engaged in these generous activities, on average, compared to about two-thirds of those employed as manual labor supervisors, and about half of manual labor workers. In summary, “people in higher class positions actually give significantly more in relative terms than those in lower classes” (Li 2015a, p. 48). Li (2015b) and Portes (1998) identify social capital as one of the great sociological “exports,” referring to the wide-scale appeal of the construct’s adoption within a variety of social science fields. Social capital can be understood in many ways, including two primary forms: as resources embedded within social networks, and as a generalized sense of social trust in others. Focusing on the first domain, Li, Savage, and Warde (2015b) studied 1564 respondents in a nationally representative survey of British households and find a relationship between social capital and cultural practices. People tend to share similar lifestyle choices with those whom they are similar to, in terms of social and economic statuses. For example, people in the professional and managerial class shared a high level of educational resources, which are highly transferred from parents to children, and education is a key predictor of cultural practices, including generosity. Cultural capital is also causal of generosity within informal social networks, which are translated into formal civic engagement activities (Li et al. 2015a). Considering the second domain—social trust—Li et al. (2018) find that “confidence in the moral orientation or trustworthiness of fellow citizens” (p. 1) has generally been stable over time, with about half of the British population expressing social trust, in a representative study of 1595 households. People with advanced educational levels account for a greater share of those who are socially trusting, with lower shares of social trust among

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people with less education. Moreover, people with higher degrees of social trust are more likely to be engaged in generous activities, across a variety of social and civic engagement forms. Similarly, another Science of Generosity project also found links between social capital and generosity. Studying more than 9464 people based in 15 European countries, Paxton et al. (2014) found religious capital contributed to greater volunteering, across multiple geopolitical and cultural boundaries. For example, Catholics in multiple countries were more likely to volunteer when they prayed in conjunction with attending religious services; for Protestants, both praying and service attendance had independent effects on volunteering. Moreover, a one unit increase in religious salience— the importance of one’s religion in daily life—increased volunteering propensity by about the same amount as did eight years of additional education. If considering boosts to volunteering as relatively exchangeable, one implication of this finding is that participating in religious activities is a more malleable social resource than are educational gains. In a second study that focused on the malleability of social trust, Paxton and Glanville (2015) studied 194 participants in an experiment that r­ andomly assigned them into a low trust or high trust condition. In the high trust condition, game mates (which were actually computer simulated) transferred large portions of their allotment to the participant, fostering trust in reciprocation. Alternatively, low or zero amounts are shared in the low trust condition. After the game, participants completed a survey that asked about their general sense of trust, and these results were compared to their own answers on the same survey questions, asked one week before playing this trust game. The researchers found that participating in the high trust game increased general social trust by about half a standard deviation, whereas it was lowered by about the same amount in the low trust game. In summary, the researchers report that “generalized social trust is experience-based and responsive to social interactions” (Paxton and Glanville 2015, p.  201). Even within a relatively short period of time, social trust grows or shrinks. This finding is especially important within the context of a third study that investigated cross-national levels of social trust and generosity (Glanville, Paxton, and Wang 2016). Analyzing data from 33,062 participants living in 160 regions and 19 countries of Europe, Fig. 3.6 visualizes differing rates of participation in generous activities by country. In the first map (a), regional means for formal volunteering show that Spain, Italy, and Eastern Europe have considerably lower volunteering rates than Germany, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. The second map (b) shows that charitable giving rates are fairly

Fig. 3.6  Generosity across European regions in Glanville et  al. (2016, p.  535 and 543). (Reprinted from Glanville et al. (2016) by the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Actions. Reprinted by permission of SAGE Publications, Inc. Permission granted through the International Association of STM Publishers. Note from Source: “Figures 1a to 1c display the NUTS 2 regional means for formal volunteering, charitable giving, and informal helping. As the maps illustrate, there are considerable differences in the average levels of each type of generosity both across countries and within countries. Endnote 10: The intraclass correlations (ICCs) are.072, .085, and.077 for formal volunteering, charitable giving, and informal volunteering, respectively. The conditional ICCs after inclusion of the individual-level predictors are very similar. But after inclusion of the social capital regional predictors, for volunteering and donating they decline by about 40% (to .042, .048). We can view the conditional ICC as the degree of dependence among observations within regions that have the same level of social capital. Thus, we are able to significantly explain the dependence among people in regions by including social capital. Similarly, if we compare the variance at the regional level before and after inclusion of the individual-level predictors and before and after the inclusion of the regional-level predictors, the bulk of the variance explained comes with the inclusion of social capital regional-level predictors. For example, with volunteering, the proportion of the regional-level variance explained by the social capital variables is 22% of the possible variation”)

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similar. However, the informal helping map (c) reveals a somewhat inverse pattern, with Spain and France evidencing considerably lower rates of participation. Austria, Germany, and the Netherlands are the most generously involved in informal helping. Investigating what factors explain these different rates of participation across cultures, the researchers find that social capital matters. Specifically, a 10 percent increase in the country-level number of social ties relates to one-quarter of a percent more country-level volunteering and nearly 2 percent more country-level informal helping (Glanville, Paxton, and Wang 2016). Considering the relative similarities of these European countries, in comparison to countries in other major world regions, the fact that any differences in these rates was found across countries is interesting and reveals the extent to which regional sub-cultures foster differing levels of generosity. Most notably, some cultures engage more in formal forms of generosity, whereas other cultures engage in generosity more informally.

Multiplicative Causes In summary, there are multiple causes of generosity, which can be categorized according to levels of social forces, in terms of micro-, meso-, and macro-levels. Individual factors explain who is more and less generous, through genetic dispositions and social psychological orientations. In addition, people learn to give through their interpersonal social interactions, including the important role of families, particularly parents, in socializing children to give. Children also learn to give from non-parental socializing agents, including other adults and peers. Moreover, giving takes effort that can be inhibited by the busyness of everyday life. People need resources to sustain generous inclinations, and many of the Science of Generosity projects indicate the importance of social and cultural resources in sustaining generosity. Political and religious institutions also shape generosity in meaningful ways. Cumulatively, these studies highlight generous causes. The next chapter reviews the consequences of generosity.

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Paxton, Pamela, Nicholas E. Reith, and Jennifer L. Glanville. 2014. Volunteering and the Dimensions of Religiosity: A Cross-National Analysis. Review of Religious Research 56 (4): 597–625. Portes, Alejandro. 1998. Social Capital: Its Origins and Applications in Modern Sociology. Annual Review of Sociology 24 (1): 1–24. Preston, Stephanie D., and Frans B.M. de Waal. 2002. Empathy: Its Ultimate and Proximate Bases. The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 25: 1): 1–1):20. Sebastián-Enesco, Carla, and Felix Warneken. 2015. The Shadow of the Future: 5-Year-Olds, but Not 3-Year-Olds, Adjust Their Sharing in Anticipation of Reciprocation. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 129 (January): 40–54. Smith, Christian. 2010. What Is a Person?: Rethinking Humanity, Social Life, and the Moral Good from the Person Up. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Spinrad, Tracy L., Nancy Eisenberg, Amanda Cumberland, Richard A.  Fabes, Carlos Valiente, Stephanie A.  Shepard, Mark Reiser, Sandra H.  Losoya, and Ivanna K.  Guthrie. 2006. Relation of Emotion-Related Regulation to Children’s Social Competence: A Longitudinal Study. Emotion 6 (3): 498–510. Swain, James E., and Shao-Hsuan Shaun Ho. 2017. Parental Brain: The Crucible of Compassion. New York: Oxford University Press. Swain, James E., Sara Konrath, Stephanie L.  Brown, Eric D.  Finegood, Leyla B. Akce, Carolyn J. Dayton, and S. Shaun Ho. 2012. Parenting and Beyond: Common Neurocircuits Underlying Parental and Altruistic Caregiving. Parenting: Science & Practice 12 (2/3): 115–123. Warneken, Felix. 2013. Young Children Proactively Remedy Unnoticed Accidents. Cognition 126 (1): 101–108. Warneken, Felix, and Emily Orlins. 2015. Children Tell White Lies to Make Others Feel Better. British Journal of Developmental Psychology 33 (3): 259–270. Warner, Carolyn M., Ramazan Kılınç, Christopher W. Hale, Adam B. Cohen, and Kathryn A. Johnson. 2015. Religion and Public Goods Provision: Experimental and Interview Evidence from Catholicism and Islam in Europe. Comparative Politics 47 (2): 189–209. Warner, Carolyn M., Ramazan Kılınç, Christopher W. Hale, and Adam B. Cohen. 2018. Generating Generosity in Catholicism and Islam. New York: Cambridge University Press.

CHAPTER 4

The Consequences of Generosity: From the Interpersonal to the Collective

In contrast to the wealth of information available on the causes of generosity, many of which are summarized in Chap. 3, the consequences of generosity in this chapter are understudied. As Barman (2017, p.  223) stated: “less attention has been given to tracking out the consequences of such gifts for beneficiaries and to determine if they achieve funders’ intended outcomes (Goss 2007; Gautier and Pache 2015).” Investigating the social impact of philanthropic activity is an important endeavor, and there are many resources available on this topic (e.g. Epstein and Yuthas 2017; Acs 2013; Osburg and Schmidpeter 2013; Maas and Liket 2011a, b; Ebrahim and Rangan 2010; Werbel and Wortman 2000). As is often typical of major scientific projects, the Science of Generosity Initiative did not fund impact studies. Unfortunately, impact studies are not often viewed as having the same caliber as what is often considered “pure” science, studies for study’s sake. However, funders interested in truly moving the needle, in terms of understanding the consequences of generosity, need to also support high-quality social impact studies. For the purposes of this book, which focuses on the studies supported by the Science of Generosity Initiative, consequences of generosity are not focused on the intended outcomes of philanthropy. Rather, this chapter reviews consequences for individual donors, within interpersonal relationships, for groups, organizationally within workplace contexts, within network connections, and for social institutions. © The Author(s) 2020 P. S. Herzog, The Science of Generosity, Palgrave Studies in Altruism, Morality, and Social Solidarity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26500-7_4

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Individual Consequences Though consequences of generosity are understudied generally, several projects in the Science of Generosity project investigated the results of generosity. Notably, Smith and Davidson (2014) tracked individual consequences to donors in a book entitled The Paradox of Generosity. The paradox was that results to givers are counter-rational: losing promotes gaining. Giving away resources returns personal wellbeing. The researchers summarized: “the more generous Americans are, the more happiness, health, and purpose in life they enjoy” (p.  2). For example, comparing people who give away 10 percent or more of their income to charitable causes, to people who give away less or no money, high givers were 9 percent more likely to rate their physical health as excellent or very good. Likewise, people who volunteered in the past year were 13 percent more likely to rate their physical health high. Alternatively, there is nearly double the proportion of non-givers rating their physical health as poor or fair, with 36 percent of non-givers versus 17 percent of high givers rating their physical health low. With regard to psychological wellbeing, nearly all of those who volunteer reported that volunteering improves happiness, emotional health, and selfesteem: 96 percent, 94 percent, and 93 percent, respectively (Smith and Davidson 2014). Additionally, generous people also enjoyed having a greater sense of their life purpose. For example, four in ten high givers strongly sensed their purpose, compared to only three of ten low givers. This difference is even higher for informal helping and relational generosity, with more than double the proportion of people having a strong sense of purpose being generous informally (48 percent compared to 22 percent with low informal giving). The researchers concluded by stating: “practicing generosity is good for people, both for the givers and those who receive” (p. 227). Similarly, other studies outside those supported by the Science of Generosity Initiative also corroborate a link between wellbeing and generosity. For example, Konow and Earley (2008) experimentally studied 186 participants, with a total of 25,482 data points to examine the causes of generosity within a dictator game: the participant deciding how much money to allocate to give to an unknown other player in the game. Those who were generous in the game had higher levels of happiness and psychological wellbeing. However, upon further examination, these researchers concluded that psychological wellbeing was the causal factor resulting in both a consequence of greater happiness and more generosity. Complexly,

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those with greater psychological wellbeing may self-select into more generous behaviors, and also derive greater happiness from engaging in generous behaviors. Relatedly, Paulus and Moore (2017) studied 64 children in Germany who were three to six years old and enrolled in preschool. Children were given balloons to give. There were two treatment conditions: children shared a balloon with another child and were asked to evaluate how giving made them feel, or children were shown one child giving a balloon to another child, or otherwise, and then asked to evaluate the feelings of the giver or non-giver. In a control condition, children were asked to think about themselves and their own emotions, but without any giving interaction. A similar experiment was repeated with stickers as the symbolic resource, replacing balloons. In all the treatment conditions, children viewed giving as making the giver happier, whether they were personally the giver or whether they were evaluating the emotions of a hypothetical giver. Interestingly, this indicates that it could be that the link between generosity and wellbeing is due to people anticipating happiness to be the result of their giving. Likewise, Layous et al. (2014) reviewed several studies that found generosity to characterize happy people, and in turn, that engaging in generous activities protected people from mental health issues, such as through decreased loneliness and rumination (dwelling on negative experiences), as well as increased coping (such as thinking about the possible benefits of a difficult event). The researchers provide an example by suggesting that: “practicing kindness could help redirect a youth with a proclivity for sensation-­ seeking toward the ‘natural high’ of acting prosocially and improve a strained relationship” (p. 9). In addition to these psychological and physiological individual consequences of generosity, Brooks (2007) finds that giving actually engenders personal wealth. Counter to the expectation that greater income leads to greater giving, this study focused on the inverse and found that generous people are generally more prosperous. Analyzing survey data collected from nearly 30,000 U.S. observations, Brooks found that a $1 increase in charitable donations returned a nearly $4 increase in average household income. Stated as an example, a person contributing $500 to a charitable cause would be likely to earn $2000 more annually. Thus, donors can benefit from their own giving in multiple ways, including monetarily, physically, and mentally. Generosity appears to breed physical, p ­ sychological, and economic health and wellbeing: the more people give, the more they prosper.

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Interpersonal Consequences Turning to social outcomes, several studies in the Science of Generosity Initiative investigated results of giving beyond the donor. For instance, researchers studied the effect of generosity within marital dynamics, collecting data from both spouses and totaling to 2730 individual participants based within 1365 couples. First, primary participants reported that their own generosity was linked to an increased reporting of their marital quality, decreased marital conflict, and lower likelihood of eventually divorcing (Dew and Wilcox 2013). Additionally, and importantly, spouses reporting generosity toward the participant was associated with the participant reporting greater marital quality, lower marital conflict, and lower divorce likelihood. Moreover, when spouses were mismatched in their generosity, marital quality was low: when one spouse reported high levels of generosity toward the other, while the other reported reciprocating low levels of generosity, marital dyads were unsettled. The researchers summarized these findings by stating: Finding that both the receipt of marital generosity from one’s spouse and the extension of marital generosity to one’s spouse are associated with higher quality marriages among married couples age 18 to 45 in the United States. This study also suggests that, for contemporary couples, it may be better both to give and receive high levels of marital generosity. (Dew and Wilcox 2013, p. 1227)

In terms of what explained who was martially generous, and who was not, Wilcox and Dew (2016) studied the same sample of married couples and found that three primary factors predicted marital generosity: domestic egalitarianism, religiosity, and commitment to continuing the marriage. The forms of generosity expressed in marriages included seeing the best in one’s spouse, noticing the spouse’s good points, a willingness to sacrifice for one’s spouse, expressing gratitude to one’s spouse, and additional forms of other-centered relationship expressions. Domestic egalitarianism was measured through two indicators. The first was traditional labor distributions of husband working and wife as homemaker, versus both husband and wives employed. The second was sharing of household tasks and childcare equally. Religiosity was measured by the frequency of praying and attending religious services, as well as whether the couple felt their marriage was “centered on God.”

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Commitment to continuing the marriage was evaluated through a scale with numerous measures about the extent to which each part of the marital couple was personally committed to their spouse and to continuing their relationship. For example, one measure asked participants the extent to which they agreed or disagreed with the statement: “I want this relationship to stay strong no matter what rough times we encounter” (Wilcox and Dew 2016, p.  106). Lastly, participants were asked the extent to which they believed in “marital permanence,” the idea that a couple who has children should stay married, barring physical or emotional abuse. The results of this study indicated that martial generosity was higher when wives worked and when wives were religious (Wilcox and Dew 2016). Moreover, when both husbands and wives reported egalitarian housework, martial generosity was higher. Additionally, marital generosity was higher among couples who attended religious services together and who believed God was present in their marriage. In a third study from this project, Kim and Dew (2016) found that marital investments returned positive benefits for the community. Contrary to the “greedy marriage thesis” (Coser 1974; Coser and Coser 1974), some couples were more likely to invest social efforts beyond their marriage by volunteering more. Importantly, two types of couples were found: those that believe in soulmate marriages, and those that viewed marriage as a social institution that primarily garnered economic and childrearing benefits. The former—soulmate marriages—tended to be more in line with Coser’s greedy marriage idea, evidencing less volunteering in the community. Alternatively, institutional views of marriage supported greater community generosity. Interestingly, the more couples invested in these marriages, the more they volunteered in the community. In essence, marital generosity promoted community generosity.

Group Consequences Returning to reciprocity, in the context of group dynamics, Ule et al. (2009) found that generosity in groups has the consequence of promoting indirect punishment as a way to maintain collective benefit without any free riders. Additionally, Love and Singh (2013) discuss the merits of generous negotiating strategies as ways to give more than what is received. Quoting Lao Tzu, the others relay, “Wise souls don’t hoard; the more they do for others the more they have, the more they give the richer they are” (p. 285). They continue by describing “grabbiness,” or what some would call stinginess or

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selfishness, as the inverse of generosity and warn that negotiating for grabbiness can have detrimental long-term consequences, despite its potential for short-term gains. The authors assert that “generosity may benefit all in terms of both material and emotional wellbeing, leading to cooperation and mutual benefit.” (p. 286). In this sense, generosity is a good negotiation practice for maintaining positive group dynamics  (Klapwijk and Van Lange 2009).

Organizational Consequences As far as organizational consequences are concerned, a project in the Science of Generosity Initiative investigated workplace generosity across multiple cultural contexts. Lyubomirsky (n.d.) and colleagues began with a study of 32 employees of one workplace in Japan, at an engineering firm (Chancellor 2013; Chancellor et al. 2015). For six weeks, workers were randomly assigned to either a neutral or a positive workplace activity. In the neutral activity, workers were asked to spend about 10 minutes per week to make lists of their work accomplishments, instructed to be detailoriented and to avoid writing down any feelings. The positive activity instead involved workers spending about 10 minutes per week writing down three things that went well at work during the previous week, instructed to write down why it went well and describe their feelings. Before completing these work diaries, participants were asked to record their happiness at the outset of the experiment, then again in the middle, and subsequently at the end of six weeks. Alongside these measures, workers wore sociometric badges that monitored behavior, including noting movement and activity levels, as well as proximity to other badge-wearers. The result of this study were: positive reflections resulted in greater happiness, more productivity, more intense activity at the beginning of the work day, and earlier returns home (Chancellor et  al. 2015). The researchers asserted: “Possibly people who wrote about three positive work-related events felt more engaged with their work throughout the day and thus were likely to interact with coworkers and more likely to finish their work quickly and return home” (p. 881). Building upon this study, the researchers turned next to studying generosity among about 100 employees of one organization, Coca-Cola, which was based in Madrid, Spain (Chancellor et al. 2018a, b). This time, the researchers asked workers to perform acts of kindness for others, beyond positivity in isolation. This prosocial activity was compared to randomly assigned groups of workers who were instead the recipients of acts

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of kindness, and a third group that was neither a giver nor a receiver. All participants in the study nominated up to 15 people with whom they normally socialized at work (a total of 451 ties), and for nominees that were also participants in the study (a total of 325), mutual ties were formed in a network analysis (a total of 122 mutual ties within the experiment). This allowed the researchers to assess mutual wellbeing among network ties, and to track that wellbeing over time as workers participated in the experiment. The network ties that connect workers to a giver resulted in a nearly 90 percent increase in one’s own generosity (Chancellor et  al. 2018a). In essence, generosity in the workplace cascaded through network ties to promote greater generosity in coworkers. Interestingly, the ties to receivers of generosity also resulted in greater generosity in coworkers, by about a two-thirds increase. Additionally, being connected to givers also increased wellbeing, in terms of work satisfaction, positive affect, and connectedness. However, being connected to receivers had no net gain to personal wellbeing. In summary, randomly assigning workers to be generous in their acts of kindness promoted positive wellbeing in the givers of those acts, and this in turn inspired generosity in the recipients of kind acts, and in observers of acts of kindness. Thus, this project found that generosity spreads contagiously through workplace networks.

Social Network Consequences Generosity also cascades through social networks more generally. Christakis and colleagues found this in a number of project studies. First, Fowler and Christakis (2010) began by analyzing an existing set of public goods games experiments, totaling 240 participants. The game was played in groups of four, with multiple rounds of repetitions. Participants allotted money to either the group or to themselves, and they could spend their own money to punish other members who were allotting selfishly. The results of this game indicated generosity network influences, even among these unknown alters. For instance, for each money unit donated by a person, an unknown network tie donated an additional one-fifth of a money unit. Moreover, generosity cascaded through two degrees of ­network ties, even without participants knowing the amounts of contributions by others in the network. These network effects accumulated across rounds of the game, showing that network generosity builds over time.

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In a second study, Rand, Arbesman, and Christakis (2011) studied 785 participants who were randomly assigned to four conditions with repeat games that involved cooperation or defection. Cooperation meant that a participant paid 50 money units to each neighbor, which resulted in all neighbors receiving 100 money units. Alternatively, defection involved paying nothing and receiving nothing. Between each round, participants were reminded of the actions of their neighbors during the previous round. The network links were updated or not based on three random conditions. First, in the static link condition, the group stayed exactly as it was in the previous round. Second, in the random link condition, the links in the social network were randomly regenerated, breaking and reestablishing ties with no logic. Third, strategic link updating involved participants getting to choose whether and how to update their network connections. The results of this experiment revealed that cooperation declined in static and random networks. Only the strategic link updating networks grew cooperation, but the frequency of updating mattered. If ties were updated slowly, with only one of ten new ties each round, cooperation also declined. However, if ties were updated rapidly, with three of ten new ties each round, cooperation remained robust. Other findings indicated that cooperators made more ties than defectors, but also that defectors had greater chances of making new ties than breaking ties with cooperators. This means that participants were willing to give new ties the benefit of the doubt, essentially allowing network forgiveness with each new opportunity. In a third study from this project, O’Malley et  al. (2012) analyzed nationally representative survey data with 3232 Americans. Survey participants nominated friends that they felt close to, up to eight, populating a network grid with 28 possible network ties. On average, participants nominated about four friends. The participants then rated the strength of each of these relationships, in terms of how close they felt to each of their nominated friends. Participants also indicated whether they engaged in a variety of generous activities, including donating money, clothing, volunteering time, financially supporting a political candidate, or donating blood. Overall, the study found that the more friends nominated, the greater the participant’s health, but also that the greater number of ties participants had, on average, the less well they knew and felt close to each tie. Engaging in generous activities increased the closeness that participants felt with their ties, for about half a percent for each unit increase in generosity. Since friend closeness predicted health, generosity also indirectly improved health

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through ties. In summary, these studies found social network consequences of generosity, in terms of inducing more generosity on the part of network ties and fostering stronger friendship. In turn, generosity in social networks improved health and strength of friendships.

Community Consequences Next, consequences of generosity in communities are reviewed. Apicella et  al. (2012) studied hunter-gather communities in Hazda camps in Tanzania, Honduras. Total camp social networks were collected for a total of 205 participants, resulting in 1263 campmate ties. Highly desirable gifts of honey sticks were distributed to camp participants, who could then give honey to fellow campmates. A total of 426 gift ties emerged. From these generosity networks, the researchers found that honey gifts cascaded through two degrees of separation, to friends of friends. The researchers reported the findings by stating: Each extra stick of honey donated is associated with an extra 0.13 sticks (0.05 to 0.21) donated by each friend in the campmate networks and an extra 0.21 sticks (95% C.I. 0.10 to 0.32) donated by each friend in the gift networks. Moreover, in the gift networks, the association extends to two degrees of separation; each friend’s friend donates an extra 0.15 sticks (0.07 to 0.25) for every stick a person donates. (p. 5)

The network analysis results are depicted in Fig. 4.1, which reveals that givers (those who gave honey sticks to their friends) were more likely to be connected with other givers. Likewise, non-givers were more connected to other non-givers. Thus, also within these rural, non-industrialized, relatively non-modernized Hazda communities, individual-level generosity promotes broader community-level generosity. In a fifth and final study from this project, Arbesman and Christakis (2011) studied generosity within modern metropolitan areas in the United States. These researchers built upon prior studies that found that antisocial behaviors, such as crime, scale linearly with increases in population sizes, as well as linear increases in innovation. Do generous behaviors also scale linearly? To analyze this, the researchers investigated data from 900 combined statistical areas, which included metropolitan and micropolitan areas (suburban areas surrounding metropolitans). They studied five generous activities: voting, making political contributions, organ donation by living

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Fig. 4.1  Gift networks in hunter-gatherer societies; Apicella et  al. (2012). (Reprinted by permission from Springer Nature: Apicella et al. 2012. Permission conveyed through Copyright Clearance Center, Inc. License # 4544440086299). Note from Source: “(a) Cumulative in-degree distributions for the campmate and gift networks are significantly different from random networks with the same number of nodes and edges (Kolmogorov- Smirnov test, p