ArticleNature communications2021
Higher socioeconomic status does not predict decreased prosocial behavior in a field experiment.
Article in Nature communications, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 27 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
27 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- The association between social support and prosocial behavior: A three-level meta-analysis.PsyCh journal · 2024Pooled it
- Leveraging Behavioral Sciences to Augment Voluntary Blood Donation in China: A Randomized Control Trial and Latent Class Analysis.International journal of behavioral medicine · 2026Trial
- How Conscientiousness Influences Prosocial Behavior Among Adolescents: The Role of Empathy and Social Support.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Humans are more prosocial in poor foraging environments.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Reward Motives are Differentially Related to Depression, Anxiety, and ADHD Symptoms in Middle Childhood.International journal of behavioral development · 2025Article
- Advancing the psychology of social class with large-scale replications in four countries.Nature human behaviour · 2025Article
- Ethics trumps resources in women's and men's evaluations of potential mates and competitors.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Evolutionary dynamics of behavioral motivations for cooperation.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Parental control and adolescent social anxiety: A focus on emotional regulation strategies and socioeconomic influences in China.The British journal of developmental psychology · 2025Article
- Greater income and financial well-being are associated with higher prosocial preferences and behaviors across 76 countries.PNAS nexus · 2025Article
- How digital inclusive finance promotes social entrepreneurship: Evidence from 282 cities in China.Heliyon · 2024Article
- Integrating evolutionary theory and social-ecological systems research to address the sustainability challenges of the Anthropocene.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Review
- Neighborly social pressure and collective action: Evidence from a field experiment in Tunisia.PloS one · 2024Article
- The Development of Prosocial Behavior from Late Childhood to Adolescence: A Longitudinal and Multicultural Study.Frontiers in developmental psychology · 2024Article
- High-status individuals are held to higher ethical standards.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Subjective socioeconomic status and income inequality are associated with self-reported morality across 67 countries.Nature communications · 2023Article
- A multifaceted poverty reduction program has economic and behavioral consequences.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Objectification decreases prosociality: the mediating role of relative deprivation.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Article
- Parental Psychological Control and Children's Prosocial Behavior: The Mediating Role of Social Anxiety and the Moderating Role of Socioeconomic Status.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Does higher socioeconomic status predict decreased prosocial behavior? Methodological issues such as the reliance of survey studies on self-reported measures of prosociality, the insufficient control of relative incentives in experiments, and the use of non-random samples, have prevented researchers from ruling out that there is a negative association between socioeconomic status (SES) and prosociality. Here, we present results from a field experiment on the willingness of unaware individuals of different SES to undertake an effortful prosocial task-returning a misdelivered letter. Specifically, using the rental or sale value of homes as indicators of SES, we randomly selected households of high and low SES and misdelivered envelopes to them. Despite controlling for numerous covariates and performing a series of ancillary tests, we fail to find any evidence that higher SES predicts decreased prosocial behavior. Instead, we find that misdelivered letters are substantially more likely to be returned from high rather than low SES households.
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