Echoes of compassion in the Global Flourishing Study: Cross-national distributions and predictors of prosociality and loving care
Rates of compassionate behaviors like helping strangers, volunteering, and charitable giving vary dramatically from one country to another.
How compassionate behaviors change with age depends on the specific act, as older adults are more likely to give to charity but less likely to help strangers.
Experiencing adversity in childhood, such as abuse, is linked to a greater likelihood of performing compassionate acts like volunteering in adulthood, but a lower frequency of showing love and care to others.
A new science of compassion reveals that there is no single path to creating a more caring and supportive society.
This research matters because it gives us the first large-scale, cross-national picture of how compassion works in the real world. For public policy, it suggests that countries might learn from each other. A nation strong in charitable giving but weak in volunteering could study what works elsewhere. For mental health and healthcare, the finding that childhood adversity is linked to more helping behavior but less close-range love and care raises important questions. It suggests that people who experienced hardship may channel their care outward to strangers while struggling to express love in personal relationships. Understanding these patterns could help therapists and support groups address emotional wounds more effectively. For global well-being, this study lays the groundwork for a new field: the epidemiology of compassion. By mapping who cares, how, and where, researchers and policymakers can better understand what enables compassion to thrive, and design interventions that meet people where they are.
A new science of compassion reveals that there is no single path to creating a more caring and supportive society.
How does compassion show up across the globe? Researchers surveyed over 200,000 people in 22 countries to find out. They looked at four ways people express care: helping strangers, volunteering, giving to charity, and showing love to others.
Early pain can be transformed into a powerful drive to help others, even if it complicates our closest relationships.
They found huge differences between countries. For example, helping strangers ranged from just 11% of people in Japan to 83% in Nigeria. Showing love and care was generally high everywhere, with most countries scoring an 8 or above on a 0-10 scale. The study also looked at how childhood shapes these behaviors.
One surprising finding stood out: people who experienced childhood abuse or felt like outsiders growing up were more likely to help strangers, volunteer, and give to charity as adults. But they scored lower when it came to showing love and care to people in their lives. On the flip side, people who attended religious services as kids were more likely to do all four of these caring things as adults. The researchers also found that different types of compassion change with age. Older people gave more to charity and showed more love and care, but they helped strangers less often.
These patterns suggest that compassion is not one-size-fits-all. Different cultures, life experiences, and stages of life bring out different ways of caring for others.
The proportion of people who reported helping a stranger in the past month varied by 72 percentage points between the highest country (Nigeria, 83%) and the lowest country (Japan, 11%).
Adults who attended religious services at least weekly during childhood were 1.6 times more likely to volunteer compared to those who never attended.
Across 22 countries, a majority of people (56%) reported having helped a stranger in the past month.
The rate of helping strangers was 15 percentage points lower for adults aged 70-79 compared to those aged 18-24.
Surprisingly, new research on 200,000 people finds that experiencing abuse or feeling like an outsider in childhood is linked to a higher likelihood of volunteering as an adult.
People in the Philippines report showing love more often than those in 21 other countries, while people in Japan report it the least.
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