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People Try to Do Right by Each Other—No Matter the Motivation, Says New Scientific Study
This new study from Ohio State University is one of the largest to examine how people are naturally compelled to help others.
Social & Lifestyle
People want to help each other, even when it costs them something and even when the motivations to help don’t always align, a new study suggests.
In research published earlier this month in the journal Science Advances, sociologists found that people overwhelmingly chose to be generous to others—even to strangers, and even when it seems one motivation to help might crowd out another.
It is the first study to examine how all the established motivations to be generous interact with one another.
“We wanted to do an exhaustive study to see what the effects of those motivations would be when combined—because they are combined in the real world, where people are making choices about how generous or kind to be with one another,” said David Melamed, lead author of the study and an associate professor of sociology at The Ohio State University.