Via Greater Good: “The study, recently published online in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, first looked at data from a national survey of about 1,500 United States residents that asked about their household income and home state, among other details. The survey also used a technique that prior research has found effective at measuring generosity: It told respondents that they’d won 10 raffle tickets, then gave them the chance to donate any number of these tickets to another survey respondent who didn’t get any tickets (and whom they’d never meet). They found that in states with high inequality, higher-income people were less generous than people who had lower incomes. However, in states with low inequality, the opposite was true: People with higher incomes were more generous with their raffle tickets. In states where inequality was neither especially high nor low, residents’ income was unrelated to their levels of generosity.”