Exposure to the COVID-19 pandemic environment and generosity Brañas Garza, P. Espín Martín, Antonio Manuel García Muñoz, Teresa María Generosity COVID-19 Experiments Social preferences Financial support from MINECO-FEDER (PGC2018-093506-B-I00, PID2019-106146GB-I00 and PID2019-108718GB-I00), Excelencia-Andalucia (PY18-FR-0007), the Basque government (IT1336-19), the University of Granada (B-SEJ-280-UGR20) and GACR (17-25222S) is gratefully acknowledged. Antonio Espin acknowledges funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie SklodowskaCurie grant agreement no. 754446 and UGR Research and Knowledge Transfer Fund - Athenea3i. We report data from an online experiment which allows us to study how generosity changed over a 6-day period during the initial explosive growth of the COVID-19 pandemic in Andalusia, Spain, while the country was under a strict lockdown. Participants (n = 969) could donate a fraction of a €100 prize to an unknown charity. Our data are particularly rich in the age distribution and we complement them with daily public information about COVID-19-related deaths, infections and hospital admissions. We find correlational evidence that donations decreased in the period under study, particularly among older individuals. Our analysis of the mechanisms behind the detected decrease in generosity suggests that expectations about others’ behaviour, perceived mortality risk and (alarming) information play a key—but independent—role for behavioural adaptation. These results indicate that social behaviour is quickly adjusted in response to the pandemic environment, possibly reflecting some form of selective prosociality. 2022-02-02T12:44:21Z 2022-02-02T12:44:21Z 2022-01-12 info:eu-repo/semantics/article Brañas-Garza P... [et al.]. 2022. Exposure to the COVID-19 pandemic environment and generosity. R. Soc. Open Sci. 9: 210919. [https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.210919] http://hdl.handle.net/10481/72620 10.1098/rsos.210919 eng info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/EC/H2020/754446 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/es/ info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess Atribución 3.0 España Royal Society