A new study is suggesting a quantifiable link between a person’s selflessness and their potential to earn more money and have more children.
To reach this conclusion, researchers from three bodies — the Institute for Futures Studies, the University of South Carolina and Stockholm University — studied both reported behaviors and attitudes in Americans and Europeans to discover that selfishness in these groups had an unmistakable parallel to their fertility and salaries.
“The result is clear in both the American and the European data,” said one of the researchers at Stockholm University, Kimmo Erikkson, who also co-authored the study “Generosity pays: Selfish people have fewer children and earn less money” that has been published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
“The most unselfish people have the most children and the moderately unselfish receive the highest salaries,” Erikkson continued. “And we also find this result over time — the people who are most generous at one point in time have the largest salary increases when researchers revisit them later in time.”
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Four separate studies were conducted to determine the link between selfishness and fertility and monetary earnings, with researcher Pontus Strimling from the Institute for Futures Studies noting that, in one study, researchers “examined the expectations of ordinary people to see if their expectations aligned with our data.”
“The results of this study showed that people generally have the correct expectation that selfish people have fewer children, but erroneously believe that selfish people will make more money,” Strimling explained. “It is nice to see that generosity so often pays off in the long run.”
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Those who conducted the study made sure to point out that they still have a ways to go, as they haven’t answered the question of whether improving one’s social dynamics could improve fertility or income and have only dabbled in two geographical areas.
“Future research will have to delve deeper into the reasons why generous people earn more, and look at whether the link between unselfishness, higher salaries and more children also exists in other parts of the world,” said “Generosity pays” co-author Brent Simpson from the University of South Carolina.
He added, “And it is of course debatable how unselfish it really is to have more children.”
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