Abstract
Effective altruists argue that charitable giving is over-influenced by empathic responses and should instead be guided by cost-benefit analyses about the effectiveness of giving. To provide insight into the extent to which empathy and effectiveness are associated with charitable giving in the population, two meta-analyses are conducted, synthesising 416 effect sizes from 124 papers sampling 74,797 participants. Here we show that effectiveness, r = 0.34, SE = 0.04, 95%CIs [0.28, 0.40], and empathy, r = 0.25, SE = 0.02, CIs [0.21, 0.29], both positively relate to charitable giving overall. However, prediction intervals reveal significant heterogeneity. Moderation analyses reveal one crucial caveat to the overall association between effectiveness and charitable giving: although the mean effect is relatively large when effectiveness is measured, r = 0.42, CIs [0.35, 0.48], manipulated effectiveness has a weak effect, r = 0.03, CIs [−0.10, 0.17]. Our findings suggest that while people may self-perceive as effective altruists, they give like empathic ones, a disjunction that calls for deeper causal investigation.
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Data availability
The data are publicly available on the Open Science Framework: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/QZ9AX48.
Code availability
Analyses were conducted through R, using code that is viewable on the Open Science Framework: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/QZ9AX48.
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Acknowledgements
Funding to support this research was acquired through an Australian Research Council Fellowship (DE220100903) awarded to the 3rd author and an Australian Research Council Linkage grant (LP200200046) awarded to the 1st and 3rd authors.
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C.C. and M.H. acquired funding and conceived the study. C.C. supervised the project and led data coding. J.S. conducted the data extraction, formal analyses, and visualisation. M.H. wrote the first draft of the manuscript. All authors contributed to reviewing and editing subsequent drafts.
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Hornsey, M.J., Spence, J.L. & Chapman, C.M. Meta-analyses on charitable giving clarify evidence for empathic and effective altruism. Nat Commun (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-70230-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-70230-8
