Responses from 46,000 people in 68 countries show that the tendency to be altruistic changes with the ideology one identifies with.
Do people on the left have a monopoly of the heart? In other words, is being generous somehow related to political orientation? Researchers from the IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca, the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and the University of Milan Bicocca have looked at the generosity of citizens according to their positioning on the political spectrum, while analyzing the different types of generosity.
For this study, published in the PNASthe official journal of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, Veronica Pizziol and her colleagues analyzed data collected on more than 46,000 participants in 68 countries, between April and May 2020. The aim was to determine whether and how political ideology was associated with generosity.
Different generosities whether on the left or on the right
To measure political ideology, participants were first asked to identify their political orientation on a scale of 0 (far left) to 10 (far right). To measure generosity, the researchers then used participants’ donation decisions, with the possibility of helping a charity. Study participants were asked to report what percentage of a sum of money they chose to keep for themselves, and how much they donated to a national or international charity working to protect people from COVID-19.
The conclusions obviously have enough to revive opposition. “Analyzing the responses, we found that people more on the left are more likely to donate in general and also more likely to be generous internationally. More people on the right are more likely to donate. donate nationwide,” says Veronica Pizziol, PhD student in economics at the IMT school and first author of the paper, who adds, “These results are very consistent and have been checked to exclude other factors that could have influenced the answers.
“Since the survey was conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic, people on the right might have been less generous to COVID-19 charities simply because they were less likely to believe that COVID-19 was a great threat. But it didn’t.”
In summary, the study shows that around the world, people on the left are more inclined to be altruistic, in general and towards the international community. But conservative and right-wing people are also generous. On the other hand, they tend to be more invested in their country. This might sound like confirmation of a prejudice, it is actually a trend observed all over the world.