Traditional and Health-Related Philanthropy: The Role of Resources and Personality

I study the relationships of resources and personality characteristics to charitable giving, postmortem organ donation, and blood donation in a nationwide sample of persons in households in the Netherlands. I find that specific personality characteristics are related to specific types of giving: agreeableness to blood donation, empathic concern to charitable giving, and prosocial value orientation to postmortem organ donation. I find that giving has a consistently stronger relation to human and social capital than to personality. Human capital increases giving; social capital increases giving only when it is approved by others. Effects of prosocial personality characteristics decline at higher levels of these characteristics. Effects of empathic concern, helpfulness, and social value orientations on generosity are mediated by verbal proficiency and church attendance.

Physiological Correlates of Volunteering

We review research on physiological correlates of volunteering, a neglected but promising research field. Some of these correlates seem to be causal factors influencing volunteering. Volunteers tend to have better physical health, both self-reported and expert-assessed, better mental health, and perform better on cognitive tasks. Research thus far has rarely examined neurological, neurochemical, hormonal, and genetic correlates of volunteering to any significant extent, especially controlling for other factors as potential confounds. Evolutionary theory and behavioral genetic research suggest the importance of such physiological factors in humans. Basically, many aspects of social relationships and social activities have effects on health (e.g., Newman and Roberts 2013; Uchino 2004), as the widely used biopsychosocial (BPS) model suggests (Institute of Medicine 2001). Studies of formal volunteering (FV), charitable giving, and altruistic behavior suggest that physiological characteristics are related to volunteering, including specific genes (such as oxytocin receptor [OXTR] genes, Arginine vasopressin receptor [AVPR] genes, dopamine D4 receptor [DRD4] genes, and 5-HTTLPR). We recommend that future research on physiological factors be extended to non-Western populations, focusing specifically on volunteering, and differentiating between different forms and types of volunteering and civic participation

Community Participation and Consumer-to-Consumer Helping: Does Participation in Third Party-Hosted Communities Reduce One's Likelihood of Helping?

Third party-hosted consumer communities in general, and brand communities in particular, have been touted for their ability to generate value for firms by promoting consumer-to-consumer (C2C) helping. However, little research has examined whether consumer communities actually foster C2C helping, and who is helped. In contrast, the brand-community literature suggests community strategies may reduce the likelihood of community members helping non-community members. If so, strategies that promote third party-hosted brand or product-category communities may be counterproductive in fostering C2C helping. Should firms focus on promoting brand communities, promoting product-category communities, or both? On the basis of a hazard model analysis of 9,192 actual C2C helping events over a 25-month period, and supported by a second cross-sectional study, this article examines how participation in brand and product-category communities influences one's likelihood of helping others. We find that brand-community participation increases one's likelihood of helping fellow members while reducing the likelihood of helping members of rival brand communities. Surprisingly, product-category community participation reduces one's likelihood of helping members of brand communities. The authors discuss managerial recommendationsclos