SynthesisThe Gerontologist2024
Are Older Adults More Prosocial Than Younger Adults? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.
Synthesis in The Gerontologist, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
What it found
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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
12 citing papers in PubMed.
- Pay-it-forward intervention increased pneumococcal vaccine uptake among older adults in China: a randomized controlled trial.BMC medicine · 2026Trial
- Fluid and crystallized cognitive abilities differentially predict successful regulation of positive versus negative emotion.Emotion (Washington, D.C.) · 2026Article
- Age moderates the association between helping and meaning in daily life.Emotion (Washington, D.C.) · 2026Article
- The preserved role of emotion prediction errors across adulthood.The journals of gerontology. Series B, Psychological sciences and social sciences · 2026Article
- Detecting age differences in prosociality using a newly developed picture-based measure.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- The neural basis of prosocial effort-based decision making in older adults at risk for Alzheimer's disease.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2026Article
- Seeing and deciding to help: neural and attentional mechanisms of prosociality in younger and older adults.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2026Article
- Large-scale community study reveals information sampling drives fairness decisions.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- A study of the prosocial behavior of middle-aged and elderly sports club members: a network analysis.BMC public health · 2025Article
- Are older adults more deceived by false advertising? Evidence from intra- and inter-brain connectivity in the prefrontal cortex during face-to-face deceptive sales.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2025Article
- Average or extraordinary? A tale of two studied samples' anxiety related recovery work after COVID-19.Frontiers in public health · 2025Article
- How does dispositional mindfulness foster prosocial behavior? A cross-cultural study of empathy's mediating role and cultural moderation.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
BACKGROUND AND
objectivesProsociality refers to voluntary behaviors that intend to benefit others. Most of the existing literature suggests that older adults tend to act more prosocially compared to younger adults, whereas some studies show that older adults might not be that prosocial under certain conditions. The current study aimed to summarize the mixed findings and quantify the age difference in prosociality by conducting a qualitative systematic review and a quantitative meta-analysis. RESEARCH DESIGN AND
methodsLiterature search was conducted based on 5 databases. The Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses guidelines were followed and this review was registered at PROSPERO (CRD42022333373).
resultsBased on the qualitative synthesis of 51 studies, older adults (n = 109,911) were more prosocial than younger adults (n = 68,501). The meta-analysis of 46 studies further supported this age effect (Hedges' g = 0.31, 95% confidence interval [0.24, 0.37]), and this age effect might be moderated by the types of prosociality. We discovered a moderate age effect in sharing (Hedges' g = 0.53), but a nonsignificant age effect in helping (Hedges' g = 0.11), comforting (Hedges' g = -0.20), or mixed prosociality (Hedges' g = 0.15). Additionally, the age effect was only significant when older adults had higher socioeconomic status than younger adults. DISCUSSION AND IMPLICATIONS: Future research should develop more comprehensive measures of prosociality, examine more variables that influence aging and prosociality, and investigate the neural mechanism(s) of prosociality to achieve a thorough understanding of the age difference in prosociality.
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Registered trials
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