Department of Psychology, Leipzig University, 04109 Leipzig, Germany;
Forensic Ambulance, Salus gGmbH, 06108 Halle/Saale, Germany.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2019 May 14;116(20):9790-9795. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1807942116. Epub 2019 Apr 29.
A landmark study published in PNAS [Côté S, House J, Willer R (2015) 112:15838-15843] showed that higher income individuals are less generous than poorer individuals only if they reside in a US state with comparatively large economic inequality. This finding might serve to reconcile inconsistent findings on the effect of social class on generosity by highlighting the moderating role of economic inequality. On the basis of the importance of replicating a major finding before readily accepting it as evidence, we analyzed the effect of the interaction between income and inequality on generosity in three large representative datasets. We analyzed the donating behavior of 27,714 US households (study 1), the generosity of 1,334 German individuals in an economic game (study 2), and volunteering to participate in charitable activities in 30,985 participants from 30 countries (study 3). We found no evidence for the postulated moderation effect in any study. This result is especially remarkable because () our samples were very large, leading to high power to detect effects that exist, and () the cross-country analysis employed in study 3 led to much greater variability in economic inequality. These findings indicate that the moderation effect might be rather specific and cannot be easily generalized. Consequently, economic inequality might not be a plausible explanation for the heterogeneous results on the effect of social class on prosociality.
一项发表在《美国国家科学院院刊》（PNAS）上的具有里程碑意义的研究[Côté S, House J, Willer R (2015) 112:15838-15843]表明，只有当个人所处的美国州存在较大的经济不平等时，高收入个体才会比低收入个体表现出较低的慷慨程度。这一发现可能有助于调和社会阶层对慷慨程度影响的不一致发现，突出了经济不平等的调节作用。基于在欣然接受主要发现作为证据之前复制其重要性的重要性，我们在三个大型代表性数据集分析了收入和不平等对慷慨程度的相互作用的影响。我们分析了 27714 个美国家庭的捐赠行为（研究 1）、1334 名德国个体在经济博弈中的慷慨程度（研究 2）以及来自 30 个国家的 30985 名参与者自愿参与慈善活动的行为（研究 3）。我们在任何一项研究中都没有发现假设的调节效应的证据。这一结果尤其引人注目，因为()我们的样本非常大，具有很高的检测存在效果的能力，并且()研究 3 中采用的跨国分析导致经济不平等的变异性更大。这些发现表明，调节效应可能相当具体，不能轻易推广。因此，经济不平等可能不是社会阶层对亲社会行为影响的异质结果的一个合理解释。
