Who Are the World’s Most Generous People? It Depends How You Ask
A new self-report ranking claims to show the world’s most generous nations. But does it line up with harder behavioral measures?
Country rankings of generosity are catnip for journalists and social media. They look simple, intuitive, and morally interesting. But the obvious question is whether these rankings are measuring anything real, or just flattering stories people tell about themselves.
That question came up recently when Remitly published a ranking of the world’s “most generous nations.” Their index is based on the Interpersonal Generosity Scale, a psychological measure built around self-descriptions of kindness, empathy, attentiveness, and willingness to put others first. Remitly says it surveyed 4,500+ adults in 25 countries through Prolific, using 10 first-person statements scored on a 6-point agree-disagree scale, and then averaged those scores by country. In other words, this is not mainly a measure of charity or volunteering. It is a measure of how generous people say they are in everyday interpersonal life.
That makes it interesting, but also raises a deeper question. If a country scores highly on a self-report generosity scale, does it also score highly on a more behavioral measure of giving?
To check that, I compared the Remitly ranking to the CAF World Giving Index. CAF’s measure is still survey-based, so it is not “objective” in the strict sense. But it is closer to behavior than to self-description. It asks whether people, in the past month, have donated money to charity, volunteered their time, or helped a stranger. CAF then averages the positive responses into a country score. In the latest edition, the index covers 142 countries, draws on Gallup World Poll data, and uses the same three core questions that have anchored the series for years.
So this is really a comparison between two different ideas of generosity.
The first is interpersonal generosity: being caring, supportive, kind, available, and willing to put others first. The second is reported prosocial behavior: giving money, giving time, and helping strangers. These are not identical. But they should overlap if both are tapping into a common underlying trait or social norm.
When I matched the 25 countries in the Remitly ranking to their CAF World Giving Index scores, the relationship was positive but only moderate. The Pearson correlation was about 0.45. That is enough to say the two measures are related, but nowhere near enough to say they are measuring the same thing. Some countries are high on both. Others diverge sharply. Japan and Poland score low on both measures, which pushes the relationship upward. But South Africa, for example, looks much stronger on the interpersonal self-report scale than on the CAF behavior-based index.
The first thing to ask is whether countries that describe themselves as generous also look generous on a more behavior-based index.
