Who gives? Characteristics of those who have taken the Giving What We Can pledge

Abstract

ObjectiveIn the current project, we focus on another group of unusual altruists: people who have taken the Giving What We Can (GWWC) pledge to donate at least 10% of their income to charity. Our project aims to understand what is unique about this population.BackgroundMany people care about helping, but in recent years there has been a surge of research examining those whose moral concern for others goes far beyond that of the typical population. These unusual altruists (also termed extraordinary or extreme altruists or moral exemplars) make great personal sacrifices to help others—such as donating their kidneys to strangers or participating in COVID‐19 vaccine challenge trials.MethodIn a global study (N = 536) we examine a number of cognitive and personality traits of GWWC pledgers and compare them to a country‐matched comparison group.ResultsIn accordance with our predictions, GWWC pledgers were better at identifying fearful faces, more morally expansive and higher in actively open‐minded thinking, need for cognition and two subscales of utilitarianism and, tentatively, lower in social dominance orientation. Against our predictions, they were lower in maximizing tendency. Finally, we found an inconclusive relationship between pledger status and empathy/compassion that we believe warrants further examination.ConclusionsThese findings offer initial insights into the characteristics that set apart those who have made the decision to donate a substantial portion of their income to help others.

Why moral psychology needs personality psychology

“…Baumert and colleagues (2024) use the experience sampling method to capture real-world instances of moral courage when people are confronted with others' norm violations. Finally, three articles shed light on the personality predictors of consequential real-world outcomes: COVID vaccination uptake (Zher-Wen et al, 2024), receptiveness to ethically-framed vegetarian advertisements (Smillie et al, 2024), and pledging to donate a substantial portion of one's lifetime income (Wilks et al, 2024).…”

“…Thus, the various articles in this special issue highlight three general ways that personality traits may play a role in shaping morally relevant outcomes. First, there are main effects of personality traits on morally relevant outcomes (Hopwood et al, 2024;Pringle et al, 2024;Wilks et al, 2024;Zher-Wen et al, 2024) that do not necessarily interact with situational factors (Thielmann et al, 2024). Second, the effect of situational influences may depend on personality traits (Smillie et al, 2024).…”