Meta-analyses on charitable giving clarify evidence for empathic and effective altruism

Why Our Reasons for Giving Matter

When you donate to charity, are you following your heart or your head? This study digs into a growing debate about whether generosity is driven more by emotional empathy for people in need or by cool-headed calculations about which charities do the most good. By pooling results from tens of thousands of people across many studies, the authors show that both caring feelings and beliefs about impact shape how much we give—but not in the way many self-described “effective altruists” might expect.

What the Researchers Set Out to Test

The authors examined two big ideas that often sit in tension. One says that empathy—feeling moved by others’ suffering—is what prompts people to open their wallets. The other, championed by effective altruism advocates, says donations should be guided mainly by evidence on which causes save or improve the most lives. Instead of pitting these motives directly against each other, the team asked a simpler question: in the existing research, how strongly is charitable giving linked to empathy, and how strongly is it linked to a sense that donations are effective?

How They Combined Evidence from Decades of Studies

To answer this, the authors conducted two large meta-analyses, statistical summaries that combine results from many separate studies. They gathered 416 effect sizes from 124 papers, covering 74,797 participants and several decades of work. Some studies simply measured people’s typical levels of empathy or their beliefs about how much difference their donations would make, and then looked at who gave more. Other studies tried to change these feelings or beliefs experimentally—for example, by presenting moving stories about people in need, or by teaching participants about which charities achieve more with each dollar.

What the Numbers Say About Empathy

Across this large body of work, empathy showed a consistent, medium-strength link with charitable giving. People who felt more empathic concern—especially warm, emotional concern rather than purely intellectual perspective-taking—tended to give more. Crucially, this held not only when empathy was measured, but also when it was deliberately stirred up in experiments. When researchers used stories, images, or scenarios to make participants feel more empathy in the moment, donations reliably increased. This suggests that appeals that help us emotionally connect with others’ hardship do, on average, make people more generous.

What the Numbers Say About Feeling Effective

Believing that donations are effective also mattered, but in an uneven way. When researchers measured people’s own sense that their gifts or chosen charities would make a positive difference, those who felt more confident about impact tended to say they would give more and often did so. Yet when studies tried to shift people’s giving by presenting clear information about which charities save more lives or use money more efficiently, the effect on actual donations was tiny and statistically uncertain. Even strong lessons modeled on real effective altruism arguments—such as comparing the cost of a guide dog to the cost of preventing blindness for many people—barely moved the needle on where or how much people gave.

Why People’s Beliefs and Actions Don’t Quite Match

This creates what the authors call an “effectiveness paradox.” On surveys, people say it matters that their giving really helps, and their answers line up with how generous they appear. But when experiments try to change their behavior by providing impact information, donation patterns hardly shift. One possibility is that people have limited insight into why they give, and may retrofit rational-sounding justifications onto choices that were mainly driven by emotion, identity, or habit. Another is that many donors see giving as an expression of personal values or connections, not as a puzzle to be solved for maximum global benefit—more like choosing a favorite restaurant than prescribing the most effective medicine.

What This Means for Donors and Charities

In plain terms, the study suggests that most of us are “empathic altruists” in practice, even if we like to think of ourselves as “effective altruists.” Warm feelings toward people in need reliably boost giving, and emotional appeals tend to work. Beliefs about effectiveness are linked to generosity on paper, but simply presenting impact statistics or arguments rarely transforms what people actually do. For charities and advocates, this means that improving the real-world impact of donations will likely require more than better numbers: it will mean finding ways to connect those numbers to human stories and emotions, and designing experiments in real-world settings that respect how people actually experience the act of giving.

Citation: Hornsey, M.J., Spence, J.L. & Chapman, C.M. Meta-analyses on charitable giving clarify evidence for empathic and effective altruism. Nat Commun 17, 3727 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-70230-8

Keywords: charitable giving, empathy, effective altruism, donor psychology, philanthropy research