Dear journalists, before we embark on a journey along all too familiar landscapes, please read this. Q (Question) 1. Mr. Bekkers, you study ‘giving to charities’. How do you know whether a donation to a charity is well spent? U (Unanswer) 1. Well, I don’t, actually. Indeed my research is about giving to charities. I do not study how charities spend the funds they raise.

As of January 1, 2013, I am appointed as an extraordinary professor Social aspects of prosocial behavior at Faculty of Social Sciences at VU University Amsterdam. The chair is supported by a grant from the Van der Gaag Foundation of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) for a period of five years. In my research I will focus on the explanation of philanthropic behavior.

This note (also available in pdf here) aims to feed the discussion about how to deal with fraud and other forms of academic misconduct in the wake of the Stapel and Smeesters affair and the publication of the report by the Schuyt Commission of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences (KNAW). The recent fraud cases in psychology (the report of the Levelt committee that investigated the Stapel fraud is

Less than seven weeks after the general elections in the Netherlands – a record in the nation’s history – conservative party leader Mark Rutte and social democrat leader Diederik Samsom presented their new government coalition agreement on October 29, 2012. The agreement consists of 81 pages of policy decisions, including budget cuts amounting to $20 billion. So what’s the news for the voluntary sector in the agreement?

In veel situaties bevinden we ons in een sociaal dilemma waarin we moeten kiezen tussen ons eigen belang en het collectieve belang. Dit geldt bij uitstek in de politiek. Welke kiezers zijn geneigd tot samenwerking in sociale dilemma’s? Vlak voor de afgelopen Tweede Kamer verkiezingen verscheen er een artikel over deze vraag in de European Journal of Personality waaraan René Bekkers meewerkte samen met drie sociaal psychologen.

Two weeks away from the general elections in the Netherlands, and a little over three months away from the US elections, we are bombarded with polls. At least one everyday, sometimes more. What do the findings of these polls tell us exactly? The perennial answer that you will hear from a scientist would be: it depends. Some polls are better than others.

Update, February 28, 2018 : The Netherlands Senate (Eerste Kamer) has voted in favor of the opt-out system proposed in parliament. The vote was close: 38 senators were in favor, 36 voted against. The ministry of Health, Wellbeing and Sports announced that the law will be implemented in the summer of 2020. The law creates another natural experiment with changes in defaults, which will be interesting to monitor.

Op dinsdag 27 juni 2012 week nam staatssecretaris van Veiligheid en Justitie Mr. Fred Teeven het rapport Vertrouwen in filantropie en de noodzaak van opleidingen in ontvangst. Bij de aanbieding van het rapport sprak staatssecretaris Mr. Fred Teeven over het belang van professionalisering in de filantropische sector.

A recent article published by Austrian anthropologists Martin Fieder and Susanne Huber in the high profile online journal PLosONE suggests that prosocial persons have more children because this increases ‘fitness’. The study compares the number of children in 2004 by respondents in the Wisconsin Longitudinal Survey (WLS) who report doing volunteer work as a form of prosocial behavior or not.

Recently, a study on religion and compassion published in Social Psychological and Personality Science attracted attention in the media. ‘Strongly religious people less compassionate’, a Dutch news website reported. This headline is misleading because the study did not show that religious people are less compassionate.

There are strong differences in the level and nature of philanthropy between individuals. Which characteristics of people are typical of generous donors? In a review of the empirical literature on philanthropy, Pamala Wiepking and I have answered this question. The review appears in two journal articles. The first paper is available online: Bekkers, R. & Wiepking, P. ‘Who Gives?