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.

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. & Wiepking, P. ‘Who Gives?

Update: June 26, 2020 “Can I please use your data on giving and volunteering?” Yes you can! In fact, you are very welcome to use the data we have collected at the Center for Philanthropic Studies.

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.

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.

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.

Statistics Netherlands recently published a table showing that generalized trust is increasing among the Dutch Population since 2002. It is said that 67% now ‘trusts fellow citizens’. This trend does not emerge from the data TNS/NIPO collects for the Giving in the Netherlands Panel Survey of the Center on Philanthropy at VU University Amsterdam.

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?

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.

There you have it – the two most interesting findings from an article about the accuracy of self-reported donations, taken to their extremes. Of course the headline is phrased such that it captured your attention.

A consistent finding in the literature on volunteering is that volunteers report better health than non-volunteers. It is often argued that this result not only implies that health facilitates volunteering activity, but that volunteering is also a way for individuals to maintain their health, avoid decline or even to enhance their health.