糖心原创

Title: Promoting prosocial behaviour through incentives and conditional giving: Experimental evidence from 42 societies

Abstract: Prosocial behaviour is key to addressing global collective-action challenges. Two prominent approaches to promoting prosociality are incentives and the use of conditional preferences, yet existing evidence is mixed and largely based on WEIRD samples. Here we present experimental evidence from 15,669 participants in 42 societies on the effects of financial incentives and conditional giving on charitable donations in a standardised task. In the incentive condition, donors received a 50% rebate on their donation. In the conditional giving treatment, participants could make their donation dependent on the share of other donors in their country. Preregistered analyses show that incentives increase prosocial behaviour by 8.8 percentage points overall, with stronger responsiveness to incentives in countries with lower baseline giving. Conditional giving increased prosocial behaviour by 7.8 percentage points on average, with stronger effects in societies with greater cultural tightness, lower relational mobility and stronger fairness concerns. Together, these findings show that the effectiveness of behavioural interventions depends systematically on cultural context, highlighting the importance of moving beyond WEIRD samples not only for advancing theory, but also for informing culturally tailored policy design.