IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/econjl/v135y2025i668p1141-1166..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

An inquiry into the relationship between intelligence and prosocial behavior: Evidence from Swedish population registers

Author

Listed:
  • Mikael Elinder
  • Oscar Erixson

Abstract

We investigate the relationship between intelligence and prosocial behaviour, using administrative data on cognitive ability, charitable giving, voting and possession of eco-friendly cars for 1.2 million individuals. We find strong positive associations for all three behaviours, which remain when using twin-pair fixed effects to account for confounders. We also find that general (fluid) intelligence is a stronger predictor than other dimensions of cognitive ability, and that most of the relationship remains after controlling for a set of mediators, suggesting a direct impact on prosocial behaviour. Finally, we show that cognitive ability is also positively related to a survey measure of altruism.

Suggested Citation

  • Mikael Elinder & Oscar Erixson, 2025. "An inquiry into the relationship between intelligence and prosocial behavior: Evidence from Swedish population registers," The Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 135(668), pages 1141-1166.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:econjl:v:135:y:2025:i:668:p:1141-1166.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/ej/ueae105
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:econjl:v:135:y:2025:i:668:p:1141-1166.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press or the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/resssea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.