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Introduction: The Science of Generosity: From Disparate to Integrated

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The Science of Generosity

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Abstract

The introduction defines generosity and links it to the approaches and vocabularies of various disciplines. The need for the book is reviewed, including the scholarly contributions to understanding learning to give, increasing knowledge through studying data gleaned from multiple methods, gaining insights into the consequences of generous behavior, and synthesizing and encouraging cross-discipline generosity research. This introductory chapter also describes the Science of Generosity Initiative and provides an overview of the projects and scholars that received funding. Emphasis is given to the range of social science disciplines the scholars in this initiative represent, as well as the multinational contexts they investigate. A road map to subsequent chapters illustrates the cohesion among the topics of the book.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In particular, among the Catholic participants, priming religious beliefs (such as duty to God, belief in God’s grace, and deservedness) resulted in two-to-three times greater odds of giving than Catholic participants who were not primed with these religious belief (but were primed with a similar reflection activity). Second, these primes did not result in statistically different results in giving for the Muslim participants (relative to Muslim participants who were not religiously primed). One possibility is that zakat practices and a salient belief in duty to God among the Muslim participants may already “absorb” a great deal of philanthropic giving, meaning that the primed participants did not give at a higher rate relative to the high rate already present among the non-primed participants.

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    Patricia Snell Herzog

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Herzog, P.S. (2020). Introduction: The Science of Generosity: From Disparate to Integrated. In: The Science of Generosity. Palgrave Studies in Altruism, Morality, and Social Solidarity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26500-7_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26500-7_1

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