Exposure to the COVID-19 pandemic environment and generosity
Metadatos
Afficher la notice complèteEditorial
Royal Society
Materia
Generosity COVID-19 Experiments Social preferences
Date
2022-01-12Referencia bibliográfica
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]
Patrocinador
Spanish Government PGC2018-093506-B-I00 PID2019-106146GB-I00 PID2019-108718GB-I00; Basque Government IT1336-19; University of Granada B-SEJ-280-UGR20; Grant Agency of the Czech Republic 17-25222S; European Commission 754446; UGR Research and Knowledge Transfer Fund - Athenea3i; Excelencia-Andalucia PY18-FR-0007Résumé
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.