Is IQ related to charitable behavior?

Note: This is a section of a longer article. To go to the start, click here.

Actually no, not in our sample. We asked our participants (n = 662) to estimate a) the amount of dollars they donated to charitable causes in the last year and b) the number of hours they spent volunteering for a charity in the last three months. The correlation between IQ and self-reported charitable behavior was negligible both for dollars donated (r = 0.01) and for time spent volunteering (r = -0.06), and the relationship was still non-significant  even after statistically controlling for income.

What do the other studies say?

Research generally suggests a positive relationship between cognitive ability and charitable behavior. Higher cognitive ability has been found to be associated with increased likelihood of charitable giving, even after controlling for factors like age, income, and education (James, 2011). This relationship is observed in both cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses, and appears to be primarily driven by general intelligence rather than specific cognitive skills (Elinder & Erixson, 2022). Thus, for some reason, our results contradict typical findings in the literature. 

Takeaways

• In our study, IQ was not related to charitable behavior, though this contradicts typical findings by others on this subject.

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