Nakamura Julia S, Węziak-Białowolska Dorota, Woodberry Robert D, Kubzansky Laura D, Shiba Koichiro, Padgett R Noah, Johnson Byron R, VanderWeele Tyler J
Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, 2136 West Mall, Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z4, Canada.
Department of Quantitative Methods and Information Technology, Kozminski University, Warsaw, Poland.
Sci Rep. 2025 Apr 30;15(1):14802. doi: 10.1038/s41598-025-96009-3.
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.
亲社会行为在促进个人和社会福祉方面发挥着至关重要的作用。慈善捐赠和帮助陌生人是亲社会性的两种重要表现形式；然而，我们对这些行为在跨国社会人口统计学指标上的差异知之甚少。利用全球繁荣研究的数据，该研究涵盖了来自22个国家的202,898名多样化的国际样本个体，我们考察了慈善捐赠和帮助行为（二元变量，是/否）在九个人口统计学因素（年龄、性别、婚姻状况、就业状况、宗教活动参与情况、教育程度、移民身份、种族和民族以及宗教信仰）以及文化多元的国家中的分布情况。过去一个月内慈善捐赠和帮助行为的未调整比例在不同国家之间差异很大，慈善捐赠方面（从0.10[日本]到0.79[印度尼西亚]），帮助行为方面（从0.11[日本]到0.83[尼日利亚]）。随机效应荟萃分析证实，慈善捐赠和帮助行为的发生率在一些人口统计学群体中存在差异（例如，年龄越大慈善捐赠越多，年龄越大帮助行为越少，教育程度越高慈善捐赠和帮助行为越多），并且所有人口统计学因素的慈善捐赠和帮助行为发生率在不同国家之间也存在差异。更好地理解各种社会人口统计学因素如何与亲社会行为相关联，以及这些关联在国际上如何不同，可能有助于为旨在增强全球亲社会性的干预措施提供信息。
