Science of Generosity

Some time ago we wanted to apply for the Science of Generosity funds with people from Akoha but at the end it didn’t work out.
Now I see that the projects winning the 1.4 million dollars have been announced. The Science of Generosity initiative also collected many datasets dealing with generosity. Interesting!

Two of the projects will examine how generosity originates and spreads within social settings. James Andreoni, a behavioral economist at the University of California San Diego, was awarded $250,000 to study the relationship between charitable donors and recipients, with a focus on how empathy affects charitable donation. His project challenges economic approaches that tend to see generosity as a function of individual self-interest; he hypothesizes, instead, that generosity emerges from within social situations and must be understood as inherently social. (…)
Harvard University sociologist and physician Nicholas Christakis was awarded $396,447 to explore how generosity spreads beyond the donor/recipient relationship and creates what he calls “cascades” of generosity within social networks.

3 thoughts on “Science of Generosity

  1. Anick-Marie

    Right ! I read things backwards – I thought you were trying to get funds from them so it did not make sense to me ;)

    I was actually a lucky victim of Akoha (in the way it was made before, I know they started a second version of it) because one of my blog readers drew a card “Read a blogger, feed a blogger”. So the day I sent a call for donations to help me feed myself sometimes last years, I received a message from a kind stranger that helped me with about 10 days of food budget :)

  2. paolo Post author

    Wow Anick-Marie! It is interesting to meet (though virtually) a lucky victim of Akoha! ;)

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