Who is more likely to help others: the low-income group who value human connections, or the high-income group who have more financial means?

There are two ways of thinking about how social class affects the spirit of helping others: 'Low-income people are more dependent on social networks and therefore more considerate of those around them,' and 'High-income people already have more resources and therefore are more able to be kind to others.' A team of researchers from China, the Netherlands, and the UK has conducted a meta-analysis to find out whether low-income or high-income people are more helpful.

Social Class and Prosociality: A Meta-Analytic Review

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/evidence-based-living/202505/does-social-class-influence-generosity

The research team conducted a meta-analysis that pooled the results of 471 studies involving more than 2.3 million participants across 60 different communities around the world between 1968 and 2024. Prosocial behavior was measured through charitable giving, volunteering, cooperative behavior in a game experiment, and self-reporting. A wide range of variables were considered, including whether the service was done in public or private, the costs and benefits of helping others, and demographic characteristics.

The results showed that people in higher social classes and higher incomes were slightly more likely to help others than people in lower social classes and lower incomes, and although the difference was small, it was consistently observed across age groups and regions.

A more in-depth analysis showed that higher-income individuals were more likely than lower-income individuals to help when it required the investment of actual resources, such as time or resources that others lack, rather than simply the intention or effort to help.

In addition, the paper concludes that there is likely a 'nonlinear relationship' between social class and prosociality. This means that the reason why prosociality is higher in higher social classes is not simply because 'higher income earners have more assets and therefore more resources to use to help others,' but rather that the reasons vary depending on the class, such as 'lower class people help others out of cooperation and a spirit of mutual help,' and 'upper class people engage in prosocial behavior to strengthen their social status or fulfill a moral obligation to give back to society.' In fact, higher income earners tend to show a spirit of mutual help in public, and the research team speculates that 'this may suggest that higher income earners are more likely to want to maintain a good social impression.'

It is important to note that the results of the study may reflect some regional variation, as most of the studies used in the meta-analysis were conducted in Western societies. It is also important to note that the studies analyzed are correlation-based, and even if they show that two variables, 'income' and 'prosociality,' are strongly correlated, they do not show a causal relationship in which one causes the other.

The researchers say that the challenge is to measure the helpfulness of participants in proportion to their income and assets. For example, if a high-income person uses three times as many resources to help others as a low-income person, but has 10 times the assets of the low-income person, the low-income person could be judged to have a stronger helpfulness because it can be said that he or she 'used most of his or her own assets to help others.'