Childhood predictors of charitable giving and helping across 22 countries in the Global Flourishing Study

While prior work documents the individual and societal benefits of prosocial behaviors, less is known about how childhood experiences shape prosociality in adulthood. Using data from the Global Flourishing Study, a diverse and international sample of 202,898 individuals across 22 countries, we examined associations between 11 candidate childhood predictors (i.e., relationship with mother, relationship with father, parental marital status, financial status, experience of abuse, feeling like an outsider, childhood health, immigration status, religious service attendance, gender, age) with two prosocial behaviors in adulthood, charitable giving and helping strangers, and whether these associations varied by country. Random effects meta-analyses pooling estimates across all 22 countries showed evidence of associations between some candidate childhood predictors and an increased likelihood of both subsequent charitable giving and helping, and sensitivity analyses showed that associations with several (e.g., experiencing abuse, feeling like an outsider, age 12 religious service attendance) were at least moderately robust to unmeasured confounding. Of note, childhood factors did not uniformly predict both charitable giving and helping. Variations in the magnitude and direction of associations were also evident between countries, possibly reflecting diverse national influences on prosocial behaviors. With further research, these findings may inform policy and practice aimed at fostering prosociality around the world.