Demographic variation in charitable giving and helping across 22 countries in the Global Flourishing Study

Abstract

Abstract Prosocial behaviors play a vital role in promoting individual and societal well-being. Charitable giving and helping strangers are two important expressions of prosociality; yet we know little about how these behaviors differ across sociodemographic indicators cross-nationally. Using data from the Global Flourishing Study, a diverse and international sample of 202,898 individuals across 22 countries, we examined distributions of charitable giving and helping (binary variables, yes/no) across nine demographic factors (age, gender, marital status, employment status, religious service attendance, education, immigration status, race and ethnicity, and religious affiliation) and culturally diverse countries. Unadjusted proportions of charitable giving and helping in the past month varied substantially between countries for charitable giving (from 0.10 [Japan] to 0.79 [Indonesia]) and helping (from 0.11 [Japan] to 0.83 [Nigeria]). Random effects meta-analyses confirmed that rates of charitable giving and helping differed among some demographic groups (e.g., more charitable giving with older age, less helping with older age, increased charitable giving and helping with more education) and that rates of charitable giving and helping across all demographic factors differed between countries. Better understanding how various sociodemographic factors may be associated with prosocial behaviors, and how these associations differ internationally, may help to inform interventions designed to enhance prosociality around the world.