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Research Article

High economic inequality leads higher-income individuals to be less generous

Stéphane Côté, Julian House, and Robb Willer
PNAS first published November 23, 2015; https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1511536112
Stéphane Côté
aRotman School of Management, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada M5S 3E6;
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  • For correspondence: Scote@rotman.utoronto.ca
Julian House
aRotman School of Management, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada M5S 3E6;
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Robb Willer
bDepartment of Sociology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305
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  1. Edited by David G. Rand, Yale University, New Haven, CT, and accepted by the Editorial Board October 16, 2015 (received for review June 12, 2015)

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Significance

Recent research finds that higher-income individuals are less generous than lower-income individuals. This work has received widespread academic and media attention, but the formulation is likely oversimplistic because it neglects the role of economic inequality. We test a new, multilevel perspective on the relationship between income and generosity that incorporates economic inequality. In a nationally representative survey study and an experiment, we find that higher-income individuals are only less generous if they reside in a highly unequal area or when inequality is experimentally portrayed as relatively high. Our findings offer a more complete understanding of the association between income and generosity and have implications for contemporary debates about the social impact of unequal resource distributions.

Abstract

Research on social class and generosity suggests that higher-income individuals are less generous than poorer individuals. We propose that this pattern emerges only under conditions of high economic inequality, contexts that can foster a sense of entitlement among higher-income individuals that, in turn, reduces their generosity. Analyzing results of a unique nationally representative survey that included a real-stakes giving opportunity (n = 1,498), we found that in the most unequal US states, higher-income respondents were less generous than lower-income respondents. In the least unequal states, however, higher-income individuals were more generous. To better establish causality, we next conducted an experiment (n = 704) in which apparent levels of economic inequality in participants’ home states were portrayed as either relatively high or low. Participants were then presented with a giving opportunity. Higher-income participants were less generous than lower-income participants when inequality was portrayed as relatively high, but there was no association between income and generosity when inequality was portrayed as relatively low. This research finds that the tendency for higher-income individuals to be less generous pertains only when inequality is high, challenging the view that higher-income individuals are necessarily more selfish, and suggesting a previously undocumented way in which inequitable resource distributions undermine collective welfare.

  • inequality
  • income
  • generosity

Footnotes

  • ↵1To whom correspondence should be addressed. Email: Scote{at}rotman.utoronto.ca.
  • Author contributions: S.C., J.H., and R.W. designed research; S.C., J.H., and R.W. performed research; S.C. and J.H. analyzed data; and S.C., J.H., and R.W. wrote the paper.

  • The authors declare no conflict of interest.

  • This article is a PNAS Direct Submission. D.G.R. is a guest editor invited by the Editorial Board.

  • Data deposition: The data reported in this paper have been deposited at Harvard Dataverse, https://dataverse.harvard.edu (accession no. ZTD2QO).

  • This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1511536112/-/DCSupplemental.

Freely available online through the PNAS open access option.

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Inequality, income, and generosity
Stéphane Côté, Julian House, Robb Willer
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Nov 2015, 201511536; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1511536112

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Inequality, income, and generosity
Stéphane Côté, Julian House, Robb Willer
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Nov 2015, 201511536; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1511536112
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