The board of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam has appointed me as Full Professor of Philanthropy at the Department of Sociology. I will continue my research on prosocial behavior, charitable giving, volunteering and blood donation. I will give a ceremonial inaugural lecture on July 12, 2018, at the 13th ISTR Conference in Amsterdam.

What can we learn from the drop in donations to Oxfam after the child abuse news broke? In the UK, about 7,000 donors cancelled, in the Netherlands 1,700, and in Hong Kong 715. First, the drop does not tell us much about what makes people give. Most donors have continued to give. The 7,000 who cancelled in the UK represent 3.5% of income in the UK. The 1,700 donors who cancelled in the Netherlands are 0.5% of all donors.

Geeft de gemiddelde Nederlander echt 559 euro per jaar aan goede doelen, zoals Arnon Grunberg gisteren schreef op de voorpagina van de Volkskrant? Nee, dat is onwaarschijnlijk. Grunberg verwees naar een cijfer dat werd genoemd in het HUMAN televisieprogramma ‘Hoe normaal ben jij?’ Het cijfer klopt niet om twee redenen. 1. Het bedrag is veel hoger dan uit ander onderzoek naar filantropie naar voren komt.

Social influences on prosocial behaviors and their consequences While self-interest and prosocial behavior are often pitted against each other, it is clear that much charitable giving and volunteering for good causes is motivated by non-altruistic concerns (Bekkers & Wiepking, 2011). Helping others by giving and volunteering feels good (Dunn, Aknin &

Scientists across the globe spend a substantial part of their time writing research proposals for competitive grant schemes. Usually, less than one in seven proposals gets funded. Moreover, the level of competition and the waste of time invested in research proposals that do not receive funding are increasing.

In a new paper, we used data from the Giving in the Netherlands Panel Survey to examine the relationship between spending money to outsource household tasks and happiness. The key result is that those who do spend money in this way are happier.

Paper – ARNOVA 2017 Presentation – Materials at Open Science Framework In the past two decades, philanthropy in the Netherlands has gained significant attention, from the general public, from policy makers, as well as from academics.

Do not use the personality items included in the World Values Survey. That is the recommendation of Steven Ludeke and Erik Gahner Larsen in a recent paper published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences . The journal is owned by Elsevier so the official publication is paywalled. Still I am writing about it because the message of the paper is extremely important.

1. No Laws All we have is probabilities. 2. All Experts The knowledge we have is continuously contested. The objects of study think they know why they do what they do. 3. Zillions of Variables Everything is connected, and potentially a cause – like a bowl of well-tossed spaghetti. 4. Many Levels of Action Nations, organizations, networks, individuals, time all have different dynamics.

pdf of this post Experiments can have important advantages above other research designs. The most important advantage of experiments concerns internal validity. Random assignment to treatment reduces the attribution problem and increases the possibilities for causal inference. An additional advantage is that control over participants reduces heterogeneity of treatment effects observed.

How to find truth in an ocean of correlations – with breakers, still waters, tidal waves, and undercurrents? In the old age of responsible research and publication, we would collect estimates reported in previous research, and compute a correlation across correlations in a meta-analysis. Those days are long gone.