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, scholarsâ 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 Initiativeâs 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 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 âwarm glowâ in another and âprosocialâ 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.
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, yetâprior to this initiativeâthe 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 âoperant conditioning,â children learn to be helpful and altruistic through receiving rewards for generous behavior and punishment for not exhibiting it (Grusec 1991). Modelingârooted in work on social learning theory (e.g. Bandura 1965, 1982, 1977)âcan 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 individualsâ 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, 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.
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.
First, a team of researchers studied the power of asking and why people say âyesâ (or how they manage to say ânoâ) 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 âcrowd outâ 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 diversityâracial-ethnic and religiousâaffect 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 masterâs 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 âcaregiving system,â which involves the ways that requests for help can activate a parental response. While this caring system is typically activated in parent-child response...