Individuals in the USA showed greater financial generosity when under threat from COVID-19, according to new research.

The researchers used the world's largest tracker of financial charity from the years leading up to and then proceeding into the pandemic, while also conducting controlled experimental games. Both inquiries found that the pandemic made Americans more generous with their capital.

Lead author Ariel Fridman and colleagues examined the relationship between the presence of threat from COVID-19 and generosity, first using a dataset, provided by Charity Navigator, the world's largest independent charity evaluator. This first dataset consisted of actual charitable-giving data spanning July 2016 through December 2020, and contained various information on 696,942 individual donations.

This dataset found that 78% of U.S. counties with a COVID-19 threat increased the total amount donated in March 2020 compared to March 2019. Even more encouraging, the charitable amounts increased the most when the degree of danger from the virus was highest: 32.9% under high threat vs 28.5% under medium threat compared to no threat.

The second data set of 1,000 people came from a controlled experiment using the "dictator game" in which one player (the dictator) receives $10 and makes a unilateral decision on how to divide it between themselves and a stranger.

Normally, across the many uses of this game in social science research, the dictator almost always gives a portion of it to the stranger, but evaluated over the same timespan as the Charity Navigator dataset, Fridman et al. found that dictators were almost 10% more generous with their $10 stake after COVID-19 arrived in the individual's country.

Like in the first finding, the participants who got to be the dictator gave away the most money if they lived in an area with a high threat level compared to when the threat level was low.

Perhaps even more encouraging, amounts given had nothing statistically to do with the age, or political affiliation of the people involved. Furthermore, the authors note it was the first-ever extended duration use of the dictator game to monitor charitable habits.

The findings are consistent with those of the recently-made Most Thoughtful Societies Index. WS reported that this index found that the USA ranked highest in the world for compassion in society, and internationally-bound private charitable contributions.

"The increased generosity observed across both datasets is particularly intriguing in light of expert predictions, based on historical data, that the economic downturn caused by the pandemic would lead to reduced giving, and the fact that a record-high majority of Americans reported a worsening financial situation during the same period," the authors say.

"Prior work suggests that when people experience such financial scarcity, they may engage in extreme, even immoral, behaviors to acquire financial wealth. Yet analyses of both our datasets clearly shows that in this particular circumstance, individuals were, on average, more willing to part with their financial resources."

"Amidst the uncertainty, fear, and tragedy of the pandemic, we find a silver lining: people became more financially generous toward others."

This research has been published in Nature.

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