Tag Archives: generosity

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.