Dr. Caroline Graf

Prosocial behavior is key to addressing global collective-action challenges. Conditional preferences, capturing how individuals adjust their behavior in response to the behavior of others, offer a promising tool to promote prosociality, yet evidence remains mixed and largely based on WEIRD populations. We study how conditionality shapes prosocial behavior across diverse cultural contexts and how cultural characteristics moderate this effect. In an online experiment, 15,600 participants from 42 countries could donate earned bonus points to international charities (e.g., UNICEF). In the conditionality treatment, participants could make their donation contingent on the share of other donors in their country. Preregistered analyses show that conditional giving increases prosocial behavior, but that the effects are larger in societies where conditional preferences and generalized fairness concerns are more prevalent. We also find universal pluralistic ignorance, although its magnitude varies; higher levels of pluralistic ignorance are associated with a greater conditional boost. These findings highlight that the effectiveness of behavioral interventions depends systematically on cultural context, underscoring the importance of moving beyond WEIRD samples not only for advancing theory, but also for culturally tailored policy design.