High economic inequality leads higher-income individuals to be less generous

DOI Web Site 2 Citations
  • Stéphane Côté
    Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada M5S 3E6;
  • Julian House
    Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada M5S 3E6;
  • Robb Willer
    Department of Sociology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305

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<jats:title>Significance</jats:title><jats:p>Recent research finds that higher-income individuals are less generous than lower-income individuals. This work has received widespread academic and media attention, but the formulation is likely oversimplistic because it neglects the role of economic inequality. We test a new, multilevel perspective on the relationship between income and generosity that incorporates economic inequality. In a nationally representative survey study and an experiment, we find that higher-income individuals are only less generous if they reside in a highly unequal area or when inequality is experimentally portrayed as relatively high. Our findings offer a more complete understanding of the association between income and generosity and have implications for contemporary debates about the social impact of unequal resource distributions.</jats:p>

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