Over de zin van impact en het impact meten

Rene Bekkers

“Wil jij impact maken?” Die vraag kom ik steeds vaker tegen. Bijvoorbeeld in advertenties voor vacatures in uiteenlopende sectoren, van een baan in de zorg tot de planologie. Maar ook voor stages bij overheidsinstellingen en vrijwilligersorganisaties, in reclame voor diensten van sociale ondernemingen, en in oproepen tot giften aan goededoelenorganisaties. Iedereen wil impact tegenwoordig.

De impact van impact

What could meta research learn from criminology for the prevention of research integrity violations? What insights does criminology provide in causes and prevention of research integrity violations? In a seminar (slides here) at the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement (NSCR), I discussed with researchers in criminology how theories and findings from the field may be applied in the field of meta research.

How can criminology help reduce research integrity violations?

Looking back at my career thus far, I see four things that helped me advance in academia: freedom, help from others, coincidence, and quirkiness. Plus privilege, health, naive optimism, and openness.

[English below]

 Wat hielp mij vooruit in de wetenschap?

Vorige week was het precies twintig jaar geleden dat ik mijn proefschrift verdedigde. Intussen ben ik hoogleraar geworden. Op een congres sprak ik een ambitieuze postdoc, die me de vraag stelde: wat heeft jou op deze positie gebracht? Die vraag zette me aan het denken. Het zouden zoveel dingen kunnen zijn geweest!

What helped me advance in academia?

Both in the Netherlands and in the USA, generosity has been declining in the past years. In the USA, the value of donations in 2023 declined by 2.1%, adjusted for inflation, according to recent findings from Giving USA. We found a similar decline in generosity in the Netherlands. The value of donations in 2022 reached an all-time low of 0.62% of GDP. The Netherlands gave about € 5.3 billion to charitable causes in the year 2022.

Declining generosity

[Update 13 juni 2024: extra nuance toegevoegd; met dank aan Mark Ottoni-Wilhelm] De budgettaire bijlage bij het hoofdlijnenakkoord vermeldt op pagina 4 een bezuiniging op de giftenaftrek. SEO maakte onlangs een evaluatie van de giftenaftrek. Ik las de evaluatie in het licht van de bezuinigingsplannen. Hier een paar gedachten.

 Wat zegt de evaluatie van de giftenaftrek over het effect van afschaffing ervan?

Helemaal niets.

 Huh?

Wat kunnen we leren uit de recente evaluatie van de giftenaftrek?

René Bekkers, March 21, 2025. At the Faculty of Social Sciences (FSS) of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, research integrity is governed by eight policies: The overarching policy is the Netherlands Code of Conduct for Research Integrity adopted by the Royal Academy of Arts &amp;

Research Integrity Policies in Social Science Research at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

To what extent does the accumulation of wealth reduce feelings of responsibility for society and behavioral manifestations of generosity, such as charitable giving and bequeathing? Since 2003, the level of generosity of the Dutch population, defined as the proportion of resources donated to charitable causes, has declined by about 40% (Bekkers, Gouwenberg, Koolen-Maas &amp;

New Research Plan: Wealth and Generosity

It’s one of those days – at 13.25 I have not yet worked on any of the main tasks I envisioned for myself. Where did all the time go this morning? I do know that I handled a lot of messages I received through e-mail. I can even feel a little satisfaction about having cleared away the clutter in my inbox.

Where did all the time go?

If you’re using the Qualtrics platform to collect data, in most cases you will not need the exact IP address or geolocation data such as longitude and latitude coordinates. As a rule, you don’t want to collect personal information that you do not need. But did you know that the default setting on the platform is to collect this type of information nonetheless?

How not to collect data on Qualtrics

The social sciences and humanities have a high level of epistemic diversity: they harbor different research traditions, with a wide variety of types of empirical data, methods of analysis, philosophies of knowledge, and epistemologies in their approaches to knowledge creation. Here I’d like to share experiences trying to enhance transparency as a common objective in two environments with high epistemic diversity.

Respecting Epistemic Diversity in Open Science

Do people give more if they are reminded of the social norm to give? Several experiments among students show that explicit reminders with texts such as “Do the right thing” lead to more cooperation in social dilemmas (Dal Bó &amp; Dal Bó, 2014; Capraro &amp; Vanzo, 2019). There is also evidence that moral norms in crowdfunding campaigns can lead to more giving behavior (Capraro &amp; Vanzo, 2019; Van Teunenbroek, Bekkers &amp;

A moral appeal does not encourage everyone to give more

Which governance instruments can we employ to promote open science? In this post I discuss governance instruments that can encourage researchers to engage in two important practices of open science: documenting and sharing research data. The practice of documenting data makes science more transparent. Sharing data makes science more open. Documenting data is a necessary first step towards more open science.

Governance instruments to promote open science

Het was *het* nieuws van de Dag van de Filantropie: Nederlandse miljonairs geven per jaar €1274 aan goede doelen. Het nieuws komt uit het hoofdstuk ‘Geven door huishoudens‘ van Geven in Nederland 2022, dat we op 16 juni 2022 presenteerden op een symposium aan de VU.  Na afloop van de presentatie sprak ik drie heel verschillende mensen. Zij vonden het om uiteenlopende redenen een laag bedrag.

Nederlandse miljonairs geven €1274 per jaar aan goede doelen

How do publications in nonprofit and philanthropic studies report on the type of data they report on? What are the characteristics of samples and measurement instruments used in research? Which research designs and methods are used in the analysis of data? To what extent do publications describe the generalizability and validity of observations?

Open call for contributors: Transparency in Nonprofit Research

All research gets published and journals compete for the best work. Here’s a sketch of the ideal research publication infrastructure, in which the new frontier is research quality.

In the ideal research publication infrastructure, the value or a piece of research is not about the prestige of the authors, but it is determined by the validity of theories, data and methods. Research quality should be the

 only

criterion that determines the prestige of research. To get there, we need to reverse course. We switch seats at the table: journals will bid for the best articles that researchers produce.

The New Frontier: Research Quality

In the public debate, the rise in inequality is linked to criticism of private philanthropy, not only as being a strategy to reduce feelings of guilt, but also as a way to evade taxes, buy goodwill, and favor causes that are benefiting the rich rather than society as a whole.   Rutger Bregman famously called for increased taxation of the rich, instead of praise for their philanthropy. The two are not mutually exclusive, as the graph below shows.

Inequality and philanthropy

pdf  Transparency is a key condition for robust and reliable knowledge, and the advancement of scholarship over time. Since January 1, 2020, I am the Area Editor for Experiments submitted to Nonprofit &amp; Voluntary Sector Quarterly (NVSQ), the leading journal for academic research in the interdisciplinary field of nonprofit research.

A Data Transparency Policy for Results Based on Experiments

January 30, 11am-12pm (EST) / 5-6pm (CET) / 9-10pm (IST)  Why do people give to the benefit of others – or keep their resources to themselves? What is the core evidence on giving that holds across cultures? How does giving vary between cultures? How has the field of research on giving changed in the past decades?

Revolutionizing Philanthropy Research Webinar

De werkgroep Filantropische Studies van de Faculteit Sociale Wetenschappen aan de Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam is het expertisecentrum op het gebied van onderzoek naar filantropie in Nederland. De werkgroep houdt zich bezig met vragen zoals: Waarom geven mensen vrijwillig geld aan goede doelen? Waarom verrichten mensen vrijwilligerswerk? Hoeveel geld gaat er om in de filantropische sector?

Gevonden: student-assistent Geven in Nederland 2020

We are pleased to announce that the Center for Philanthropic Studies has been able to secure funding for continued research on giving in the Netherlands. The funding enables data collection for the Giving in the Netherlands Panel Survey among households, as well as data collection on corporations, foundations, charity lotteries, and bequests.

Research on giving in the Netherlands continues, funding secured

Jurgen Dhollander

vroeg: “Enerzijds neemt het geefgedrag de laatste twintig jaar af, afgezet tegen het bbp. Het gaat hier dan om geven aan goede doelen. Anderzijds wordt er ook veel – ik noem het informeel – gedoneerd aan personen of ‘doelen’ dichtbij. Denk bijvoorbeeld aan crowdfunding. Zijn er cijfers bekend die enig idee geven over de grootte van deze vorm van doneren?

Filantropie en informele giften

Economen spreken van een basisgoed als de consumptie ervan relatief gesproken afneemt met het inkomen. Dit geldt heel duidelijk voor geven aan goede doelen. Hogere inkomens en vermogens doen in euro’s meer aan filantropie, maar als deel van hun inkomen en vermogen juist minder.

Hoe rijker, hoe minder vrijgevig?

Gordon Feld posted a comparison of results from a repeated measures ANOVA with paired samples t-tests. Using Stata, I wondered how these results would look in a regression framework. For those of you who want to replicate this: I used the data provided by Gordon. The do-file is here.

Multiple comparisons in a regression framework

Working with scholars from other disciplines can be a challenge.  The people you meet speak the same language, but the words they use sometimes mean different things. It takes time to learn the vocabulary, even though you know the words. Like the song:

 I’m an alien.

The joys and challenges of working across disciplinary boundaries

Public debates on philanthropy link charitable giving to wealth. In the media we hear a lot about the giving behavior of billionaires – about the giving pledge, the charitable foundations of the wealthy, how the causes they support align their business interests, and how they relate to government programs. Yes – the billions of tech giants go a long way. Imagine a world without support from foundations created by wealthy.

The force of everyday philanthropy

Geeft de gemiddelde Nederlander echt 559 euro per jaar aan goede doelen, zoals Arnon Grunberg gisteren schreef op de voorpagina van de Volkskrant? Nee, dat is onwaarschijnlijk. Grunberg verwees naar een cijfer dat werd genoemd in het HUMAN televisieprogramma ‘Hoe normaal ben jij?’  Het cijfer klopt niet om twee redenen. 1. Het bedrag is veel hoger dan uit ander onderzoek naar filantropie naar voren komt.

Wat is normaal?

Scientists across the globe spend a substantial part of their time writing research proposals for competitive grant schemes. Usually, less than one in seven proposals gets funded. Moreover, the level of competition and the waste of time invested in research proposals that do not receive funding are increasing.

How not to solve the research competition crisis

In a new paper, we used data from the

 Giving in the Netherlands Panel Survey

to examine the relationship between spending money to outsource household tasks and happiness. The key result is that those who do spend money in this way are happier.

Buying Time Promotes Happiness

Presentatie rapport ‘Culturele instellingen in Nederland’ Werkgroep Filantropische Studies Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam   Vrijdag 10 juni 2016, Theater Griffioen, Uilenstede 106, 1183 AM, Amstelveen   In 2012 werd de Geefwet ingevoerd met een multiplier die de aftrekbaarheid van giften aan culturele instellingen verhoogde.

Presentatie rapport


 ‘


 Culturele instellingen in Nederland’


 Werkgroep Filantropische Studies Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam



Vrijdag 10 juni 2016, Theater Griffioen, Uilenstede 106, 1183 AM, Amstelveen   In 2012 werd de Geefwet ingevoerd met een multiplier die de aftrekbaarheid van giften aan culturele instellingen verhoogde.

Heeft de culturele sector de cultuuromslag naar ondernemerschap gemaakt?

[*] Deze tekst als pdf downloaden  Burgerkracht, lokale actie, de doe-democratie, de participatiesamenleving: we komen deze termen steeds vaker tegen in de politiek, de media en beleidsstukken van de overheid en adviesorganen. De termen fungeren in een fundamenteel debat over de verdeling van verantwoordelijkheid van burgers en de overheid voor het welzijn van anderen en de samenleving.

De veerkracht van de filantropie

Butterfly Blog

 This article first appeared on the website of the Fundraiser Magazin.

Two twin sisters, Clara and Maria, are raised together at the same place, go to the same school, remain both in the same neighborhood. Yet, Clara is donating five times as much as Maria. Why is that? It’s probably because Clara is attending church service almost every week, whereas Maria, by contrast, makes a big circle around Lord’s house.

Clara gives more than Maria – nonprofit research makes fundraisers clever (6/2014)

Diving deep into my archives I recovered an old file in which I describe how I got to study prosocial behavior. The file is dated 21 February 2000. I reproduce it below – and here’s a pdf.

The Autobiography of A Problem: How I Got to Study Prosocial Behavior

Academic misconduct figures prominently in the press this week: Peter Nijkamp, a well-known Dutch economist at VU University Amsterdam, supervised a dissertation in which self-plagiarism occurred, according to a ruling of an integrity committee of the National Association of Universities in the Netherlands. The complaint led two national newspapers to dig into the work of Nijkamp.

Varieties of plagiarism

Here’s CRAP: a new policy regarding review requests I’ve decided to try out. CRAP means Conditional Review Acceptance Policy, the new default response to review requests. I will perform review only if the journal agrees to publish the article in a Free Open Access mode – making the article publicly available, without charging any fees for it from universities, authors, or readers. Here’s the story behind CRAP.

Conditional Review Acceptance Policy

Wereldwijd houdt een toenemend aantal wetenschappers uit zeer uiteenlopende disciplines zich bezig met filantropie. Deze trend zien we ook in Nederland. Wat is er in de wetenschap bekend over de achtergronden en de impact van filantropie? En hoe ziet het Nederlandse academische landschap eruit? In deze bijdrage geef ik een beknopt antwoord op deze vragen.

Wetenschap en filantropie

Deze bijdrage verscheen op 27 januari op Filanthropium.nl.


 Dank aan Theo Schuyt voor commentaar op een eerdere versie van dit stuk en aan Sigrid Hemels en Frans Nijhof voor correcties van enkele feitelijke onjuistheden. PDF? Klik hier.

De contouren van het toezicht op goededoelenorganisaties in de toekomst worden zo langzamerhand duidelijk.

Valkuilen in het nieuwe systeem van toezicht op goededoelenorganisaties

To address the needs of people affected by the Super Typhoon Haiyan – locally known as Yolanda – that hit the Philippines on November 8, 2013 international relief organizations in the Netherlands are collectively raising funds on Monday, November 18, 2013. Commercial and public national TV and radio stations work together in the fundraising campaign.

Haiyan Typhoon Relief Donations: Research Insights

Crowdfunding is a new model of financing public goods. In the Netherlands it has become highly visible by the cutbacks in public funding for the arts. Crowdfunding has grown exponentially in the past years, not just in projects for the arts, but also in financing commercial startups and recently also in funding for science. However, the success of projects advertised on crowdfunding platforms varies enormously.

What works in crowdfunding? Field experiments will tell

PDF of this post  The Teaching Trap  I did it again this week – I tried to teach students. Yes, It’s my job, and I love it. But that’s completely my own fault. If it were for the incentives I encounter in the academic institution where I work, it would be far better to not spend time on teaching at all. For my career in academia, the thing that counts most heavily is how many publications in top journals I can realize.

How Incentives Lead Us Astray in Academia

Can companies improve their financial performance and competitive situation through corporate philanthropy (CP) as an innovative business strategy? With my VU colleagues Dick de Gilder and Theo Schuyt and my colleague Sarah Borgloh at the Centre for European Economic Research in Mannheim we will answer this question in a new research project.

How Philanthropy Affects Corporate Competitiveness in Europe

Dear journalists, before we embark on a journey along all too familiar landscapes, please read this. Q (Question) 1. Mr. Bekkers, you study ‘giving to charities’. How do you know whether a donation to a charity is well spent? U (Unanswer) 1. Well, I don’t, actually. Indeed my research is about giving to charities. I do not study how charities spend the funds they raise.

Frequently Unanswered Questions (FUQ)

This note (also available in pdf here) aims to feed the discussion about how to deal with fraud and other forms of academic misconduct in the wake of the Stapel and Smeesters affair and the publication of the report by the Schuyt Commission of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences (KNAW).  The recent fraud cases in psychology (the report of the Levelt committee that investigated the Stapel fraud is

Risk factors for fraud and academic misconduct in the social sciences

Update, February 28, 2018

: The Netherlands Senate (Eerste Kamer) has voted in favor of the opt-out system proposed in parliament. The vote was close: 38 senators were in favor, 36 voted against. The ministry of Health, Wellbeing and Sports announced that the law will be implemented in the summer of 2020. The law creates another natural experiment with changes in defaults, which will be interesting to monitor.

Will a presumed consent system increase the number of organ transplantations?

Op dinsdag 27 juni 2012 week nam staatssecretaris van Veiligheid en Justitie Mr. Fred Teeven het rapport

 Vertrouwen in filantropie en de noodzaak van opleidingen

in ontvangst. Bij de aanbieding van het rapport sprak staatssecretaris Mr. Fred Teeven over het belang van professionalisering in de filantropische sector.

Vertrouwen in filantropie en de noodzaak van opleidingen

A recent article published by Austrian anthropologists Martin Fieder and Susanne Huber in the high profile online journal PLosONE suggests that prosocial persons have more children because this increases ‘fitness’. The study compares the number of children in 2004 by respondents in the Wisconsin Longitudinal Survey (WLS) who report doing volunteer work as a form of prosocial behavior or not.

Do prosocial persons have more children to increase fitness?

Decisions of individuals and households about how much to give and which charities to give to are affected by the behaviour of other people around them and the communities they live in. In a contribution to a conference in London I present evidence from tax records and three large scale field experiments testing social influence effects on giving in the Netherlands.

Limits of Social Influence on Giving

De afgelopen dagen heeft de Tweede Kamer gedebatteerd over een nieuwe wet op financiering van politieke partijen.  Opmerkelijk genoeg is de discussie apart gevoerd van de discussie over de Geefwet, die intussen is aangenomen en per 1 januari is ingevoerd. In de zin van de Geefwet zijn politieke partijen  Algemeen Nut Beogende Instellingen. Maar zijn politieke partijen ‘goede doelen’? Maar over deze vragen gaat het niet.

Giften naar politieke voorkeur

In the Giving in the Netherlands Survey 2007, conducted by the Center for Philanthropic Studies at VU University Amsterdam, a random sample of the Dutch population (n=1,474) answered the following question.

What does the Dutch public think about expenditures by charities?

The total value of donations to nonprofit organizations in the Netherlandshas increased to €4.7 billion in 2009. Despite the economic crisis, household giving stabilized at €1.9 billion and corporate giving increased to 1.7 billion. The figures were published today by the Center for Philanthropic Studies at VU University Amsterdam.

Giving in the Netherlands tops €4.7 billion

In an article published last year in the

 International Journal for Nonprofit &amp; Voluntary Sector Marketing

I showed that incidental similarities between donors and solicitors promote giving. Alumni of Utrecht University who were solicited for donations in a phonaton were more likely to donate when their names matched the names of solicitors and the university.

Name letter effects in online donations

A question by a student this week prompted my curiosity: where’s the address list of all registered charities in the Netherlands? The website of Netherlands tax authorities (“Belastingdienst”) provides a list of all names of registered charities, a registration number, the place where they are registered, and a URL for the organization. The list is available as a compressed (.zip) .xml file which you can import in Excel.

Where’s the Register of Charities?

A modest cheer in the office today: a first version of the Giving in the Netherlands Panel Survey User Manual is now online.

Giving in the Netherlands Panel Survey User Manual

Less than seven weeks after the general elections in the Netherlands – a record in the nation’s history – conservative party leader Mark Rutte and social democrat leader Diederik Samsom presented their new government coalition agreement on October 29, 2012. The agreement consists of 81 pages of policy decisions, including budget cuts amounting to $20 billion. So what’s the news for the voluntary sector in the agreement?

New government coalition agreement: what’s the news for the voluntary sector?

How reliable is our knowledge on mechanisms that make people give? In a webinar organized by the European Research Network on Philanthropy (ERNOP) on December 10, 2024, I’ve given a preliminary answer to this question. The slides are here. With a group of scholars we seek to identify which results have successfully been replicated in research that was conducted since the 2007

 Science of Generosity

working paper (Bekkers &amp;

Eight Mechanisms, Seventeen Years Later

This post in pdf  How generous are the wealthy? Surely wealth enables citizens to give higher amounts to charitable causes, but does wealth also make people more generous? Do the wealthy give a higher proportion of their income? Using data from the High Net Worth supplement to the 2012 wave Giving in the Netherlands Panel Survey we can answer this question.

Wealth and Giving in the Netherlands

“Thank you for the invitation to review the manuscript you’ve received for possible publication in your journal. I will consider your request only if the data and code that produce the results reported are available in a publicly accessible repository.”  This is my new default response to invitations to review manuscripts for academic journals.

Raising the Bar for Peer Review Invitations

It’s not clear what happened — yet. But the best explanation, sociologists say, involves forms of matter and energy not currently known to social science. By René Bekkers  April 13, 2021 Updated 6:20 p.m. CET  Evidence is mounting that a tiny social particle seems to be disobeying the known laws of society, scientists announced on Wednesday, a finding that would open a vast and tantalizing hole in our understanding of the community.

Finding From Social Research Could Rewrite Known Laws of Society

While the replication crisis is leading to changes in journal policies and data transparency practices in psychology, political science and economics, nothing much happens in sociology. Do we have nothing to worry about because research in sociology is more replicable than in other fields? Perhaps. We don’t really know because very few studies in sociology are ever replicated.

Do you know a study in sociology that should be replicated?

Scientific research is based on data. How should researchers treat and document the data they analyze? Research Data Management policies recommend that data should be “as open as possible, and as closed as necessary”. What does that mean in practice?

 Only publish data you are allowed to publish

. The “as open as possible” principle certainly does not mean that researchers should make all data they have public.

Data? What Data?

Check out Detecting Bad Science, a new website I’ve created to help you identify weaknesses in empirical research reports. For each weakness you’ll find suggestions to avoid or repair it, or mitigate its consequences. The materials help you evaluate the quality of research in the social and behavioral sciences. You’ll also learn how to improve research designs and reports.

Detecting Bad Science: Reviewing and Improving Social Science Research

Last week I attended a conference organized by the university libraries in the Netherlands with the straightforward title:

 “What do we want from publishers?”

The conference served as a consultation with librarians and other academics, before the universities in the Netherlands start negotiations about deals with commercial publishers such as Elsevier.

What should we want from publishers?

Surprisingly little – at least to my taste. Science is supposed to be cumulative: we should build knowledge on solid foundations. But how do we know what knowledge is solid? Through independent verification. If someone claims to have found a regularity, it is only through repeated testing of the same claim that we know that the result holds in other populations and contexts. It turns out that scientists rarely conduct such replications.

How often do we replicate previous research?

Gotcha. Or did the clickbait title not get you here? Regardless, I will try not to disappoint you. But before we get to the promised list, here’s why it is important. The nightmare of every business: suddenly a new competitor emerges, wiping out their entire firm’s market share. When ChatGPT was released a little over a year ago, it was clear that it posed a threat to the business model of schools and universities.

5 ways students do not use ChatGPT and AI (you won’t believe #2!)

In the social sciences it is increasingly common to preregister hypotheses, research designs and analysis plans before a study is conducted (Ferguson et al., 2023). Because the time-stamp on the preregistration documents when the ideas for the study were deposited, a preregistration is an intellectual honesty device.

Preregistration: why and how?

If your vision of an ideal connected world is an online platform for free exchange of knowledge and reasoned debate, untainted by prejudice and hate, you will be fascinated by the demise of Twitter since October 27, 2022. On that day, the then richest man of the world, Elon Musk, took over the company for $44 billion.

A Connected World of Academics in the Fediverse

The Researchers, Academics, and Data Enthusiasts (RADE) working group of WINGS is organizing a session “Longitudinal Studies: Contributions to Understanding Giving Behaviour and the Practice of Philanthropy” on September 19th, from 12:30 pm to 2:00 pm (UTC).

Webinar: Longitudinal Data on Philanthropy

Dinosaurs are like magic. They capture the attention because of their size and sharp teeth. The fact they are no longer among us may also contribute to their popularity. In science, we still have dinosaurs. They do date back to the prehistoric age, when scientists could build careers on undisclosed data and procedures.

The Magic of Science

“Thank you for your invitation to review. Did the authors provide the data and the code they have used to produce the paper? If not, can you ask them to?  Please make sure that the authors have their data and code available, so that I will be able to evaluate the manuscript. Otherwise, I will have to decline.”  This is my rerevised Conditional Review Acceptance Policy (CRAP – R2). In 2014, I introduced a conditional review acceptance policy.

Conditional Review Acceptance Policy (R2)

As an open science enthusiast I try to lead by example – you will gather from my blog that I am an online activist when it comes to the incentives in academia and the evaluation of research careers. Last Wednesday I took a few minutes to create a poster for an online campaign to encourage researchers to cite the data they have collected or other data they are using.

DOI the DATA

Two vacancies in our research group: I’m looking for a postdoctoral researcher and a PhD candidate to answer the following research questions: Why is the share of income and wealth that people give to charities lower when their income and wealth are higher? Are more generous persons less likely to accumulate wealth? Or does wealth make people care less about those in need?

Generating Generosity

By René Bekkers &amp; Pamala Wiepking

In decisions on academic careers, the societal impact that researchers have with their research is gaining importance. This is an addition to incentives for academic impact. Relevant indicators for academic impact are how often the researcher has been cited (the so-called H-index) and the impact factor (IF) of the journals in which the researcher has published.

Impact?

Social influences on prosocial behaviors and their consequences

While self-interest and prosocial behavior are often pitted against each other, it is clear that much charitable giving and volunteering for good causes is motivated by non-altruistic concerns (Bekkers &amp; Wiepking, 2011). Helping others by giving and volunteering feels good (Dunn, Aknin &amp;

Research internship @VU Amsterdam

Gevonden: Student assistent voor het onderzoek Geven in Nederland

Deze post als pdf  Het percentage van de Nederlanders dat vrijwilligerswerk doet is de afgelopen jaren afgenomen. In 2010 deed nog 41% vrijwilligerswerk, in 2014 is dat gedaald naar 37%. Ook het aantal uren dat vrijwilligers actief zijn is gedaald, naar 18 uur per maand. In 2012 was dit nog 21 uur. Dit blijkt uit uit het onderzoek Geven in Nederland 2015, dat op 23 april op de Dag van de Filantropie verschijnt.

Vrijwilligerswerk in Nederland neemt af

Recently, a study on religion and compassion published in Social Psychological and Personality Science attracted attention in the media. ‘Strongly religious people less compassionate’, a Dutch news website reported. This headline is misleading because the study did not show that religious people are less compassionate.

Religion and Compassion in the Netherlands

Does volunteering promote trust? One would expect volunteers to be more trusting than non-volunteers. And indeed they are. But does a change in volunteering bring about a change in trust? It appears they do not. An analysis of data from the Giving in the Netherlands Panel Survey shows that people who are more trusting are more likely to start volunteering. But becoming a volunteer does not make them more trusting.

Trust and volunteering

In the new academic year, we’re starting a PhD project at the department of Donor Studies at Sanquin Research and the Center for Philanthropic Studies at Vrije Universiteit (VU). Meanwhile, we’ve completed interviews and selected Alexandra Ciauşescu for the position.

New PhD project: Learning to Donate

Contribution to the March 2016 edition of the European Research Network on Philanthropy (ERNOP) newsletter. PDF version here.

Philanthropy can take many forms.

Philanthropy: from Charity to Prosocial Investment

In September 2011, the professional networking website LinkedIn started to offer members the possibility to include their volunteer experience in their profiles. While we may be thinking about volunteering as helping others at a cost to oneself, the new option at LinkedIn allows members to help oneself by advertising their volunteering activities.

Helping yourself by helping others?

1. No Laws  All we have is probabilities. 2. All Experts  The knowledge we have is continuously contested. The objects of study think they know why they do what they do.  3. Zillions of Variables  Everything is connected, and potentially a cause – like a bowl of well-tossed spaghetti. 4. Many Levels of Action  Nations, organizations, networks, individuals, time all have different dynamics.

Five Reasons Why Social Science is So Hard

Do not use the personality items included in the World Values Survey. That is the recommendation of Steven Ludeke and Erik Gahner Larsen in a recent paper published in the journal

 Personality and Individual Differences

. The journal is owned by Elsevier so the official publication is paywalled. Still I am writing about it because the message of the paper is extremely important.

Hunting Game: Targeting the Big Five

A new version of the User Manual for the Giving in the Netherlands Panel Survey is now available: version 2.2.  The GINPS12 questionnaire is here (in Dutch).

Update: Giving in the Netherlands Panel Survey User Manual

This post in pdf  With the year 2020 on the horizon, the recently published work programme for Research &amp; Innovation from European Commission for the years 2016-2017 is organized around a limited set of Societal Challenges. Europe defined these challenges after a long process of lobbying and consultation with many stakeholders. Going through the list I could not help thinking that something was missing.

Resilience and Philanthropy

This post was published earlier in the newsletter of the European Research Network on Philanthropy The 20

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century has seen a tremendous growth of scientific enterprise. The increasing productivity of scientists has been accompanied by a proliferation of academic disciplines.

Philanthropic Studies: Two Historical Examples

Two weeks away from the general elections in the Netherlands, and a little over three months away from the US elections, we are bombarded with polls. At least one everyday, sometimes more. What do the findings of these polls tell us exactly? The perennial answer that you will hear from a scientist would be: it depends. Some polls are better than others.

Polls About Elections: What Are They Worth?

Ralph-Friso Belksma, student in de master Public Administration in Leiden, schrijft:  “Voor een onderzoek voor mijn studie ben ik op zoek naar enkele gegevens met betrekking tot geef gedrag. Ik kan hier alleen moeilijk gegevens over vinden. Vandaar mijn vraag: Geven vrouwen meer geld uit aan goede doelen dan mannen? Hoe oud zijn zij en hoeveel geld geven zij gemiddeld uit? Ik had deze gegevens graag in 1 tabel willen zien.

Geven m/v &amp; 1941-1980

scatterplot  I’ve been active on Twitter regarding the well-publicized study that hurricanes with feminine names kill more people than hurricanes with masculine names.

my thoughts on that hurricane study

Drie nieuwe onderzoeksresultaten verminderen de hoop dat burgers de overheidsbezuinigingen op internationale hulporganisaties zullen compenseren door meer giften: Bezuinigingen verminderen de investeringen van hulporganisaties in fondsenwerving; Mensen geven liever aan doelen die anderen ook steunen; Er zijn meer Nederlanders die zeggen dat ze mee zullen bezuinigen dan Nederlanders die meer zullen geven als de overheid bezuinigt.

Overheid vermindert giften aan ontwikkelingssamenwerking door bezuinigingen

The PhD project will focus on characteristics of individual crowdfunders and of crowdfunding projects that influence donation behavior. Specifically, the research investigates the effects of online context characteristics on motivations and giving behavior of crowdfunders as well as the organizational arrangements in which crowdfunding campaigns are embedded.

VU University Amsterdam is seeking applications for a fully funded PhD dissertation research position on ‘Philanthropic Crowdfunding for the Cultural Heritage Sector’

It’s time for a career split: in the coming years, I am adding meta science and research integrity as a second line of research, next to the science of philanthropy. It’s a split, not a switch. I’m far from done with research on research on philanthropy and will keep working on it the Department of Sociology at VU Amsterdam.

Autobiography of a Career Split

As of January 1, 2013, I am appointed as an extraordinary professor Social aspects of prosocial behavior at Faculty of Social Sciences at VU University Amsterdam. The chair is supported by a grant from the Van der Gaag Foundation of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) for a period of five years. In my research I will focus on the explanation of philanthropic behavior.

Five Years of Research Ahead

In the prehistoric era of competitive science, researchers were like magicians: they earned a reputation for tricks that nobody could repeat and shared their secrets only with trusted disciples.

Closing the Age of Competitive Science

The board of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam has appointed me as Full Professor of Philanthropy at the Department of Sociology. I will continue my research on prosocial behavior, charitable giving, volunteering and blood donation. I will give a ceremonial inaugural lecture on July 12, 2018, at the 13th ISTR Conference in Amsterdam.

Full Professor of Philanthropy

Does civic engagement breed trust? According to a popular version of social capital theory, civic engagement should produce generalized trust among citizens. In a new paper accepted for publication in Political Psychology, Erik van Ingen (Tilburg University) and I put this theory to the test by examining the causal connection between civic engagement and generalized trust using multiple methods and multiple (prospective) panel datasets.

Lunch Talk: “Generalized Trust Through Civic Engagement? Evidence from Five National Panel Studies”

You probably know the 80/20 rule: 80% of all Y is done by only 20% of the actors. Y is whatever behavior you may be interested in. In many studies in the social sciences the outcomes of interest to researchers and policy makers are negative: drinking, lying, bullying, property crime. Would the 80/20 rule also hold for giving and volunteering?

The Civic Core in the Netherlands is Getting More Religious, and Less Educated

There are strong differences in the level and nature of philanthropy between individuals. Which characteristics of people are typical of generous donors? In a review of the empirical literature on philanthropy, Pamala Wiepking and I have answered this question. The review appears in two journal articles. The first paper is available online: Bekkers, R. &amp; Wiepking, P. ‘Who Gives?

Who gives? Lining up the evidence

The recent success of the Ice Bucket Challenge for ALS across the world raises numerous questions on philanthropy. In this post I give some background information to answer five of these questions.

 1. Where will it end?

It is hard to predict how much money will be raised for ALS through the Ice Bucket Challenge.

Five challenging questions on philanthropy

A new ‘Law on Giving’ has taken effect in the Netherlands on January 1, 2012. The new law includes a unique ‘multiplier’ for donations to culture and the arts. The multiplier increases the level of deduction for donations to organisations officially registered as charitable causes in the sector of arts and culture.

Changes in Dutch Charity Law

In all likelihood, you also get numerous requests to review articles, contribute articles to special issues, compile or edit a special issue, or even to join an editorial board. Recently colleagues asked me how to deal with such requests. Most of these requests come from predatory publishers such as SCIRP, MDPI, Hindawi and Frontiers.