Are left-wing political beliefs linked to greater kindness and generosity? A new study published in Social Psychological and Personality Science explores this question, examining how political orientation influences prosociality—the willingness to help others. While left-leaning individuals were found to have slightly stronger prosocial traits, the connection was weaker when it came to real-world behaviors observed in experiments.
Political orientation has long been associated with differences in attitudes, values, and behaviors, including donation preferences and views on social welfare. Left-wing ideologies are often linked to policies promoting collective well-being, such as social justice and income redistribution.
Given these ideological foundations, left-leaning individuals are generally expected to display higher levels of prosociality. However, previous studies on this topic have produced mixed results, leaving the relationship between political orientation and prosocial behavior unclear.
“Politics and the political divide between the left and the right have become an increasingly important topic, and it has also been discussed in relation to prosocial behavior. However, prior evidence was mixed and inconclusive, so we wanted to shed light on this question in a more comprehensive way than had been done before,” said study author Isabel Thielmann, the head of the Personality, Identity, and Crime research group at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security and Law.
The researchers conducted their study using data from the Prosocial Personality Project, a large-scale, longitudinal dataset designed to capture a wide range of prosocial behaviors and traits. Participants were drawn from Germany and included a diverse sample of over 1,800 individuals spanning different ages, educational backgrounds, and demographics.
Political orientation was measured using five distinct indicators: self-reported general political preferences, political leanings on social and economic issues, voting behavior in the most recent federal election, and participants’ preferred political party.
Prosociality was assessed using two main approaches. The first involved experimental economic games that simulate real-world social dilemmas, such as the Trust Game, Dictator Game, and Public Goods Game. These games required participants to make decisions about allocating monetary resources, offering a direct way to observe prosocial behavior in controlled settings.
The decisions had tangible consequences, as participants could earn or lose real money based on their choices. For example, in the Trust Game, one player (the trustor) decided how much money to transfer to another player (the trustee), and the trustee decided how much of the tripled amount to return. These games provided a measure of participants’ willingness to invest personal resources for the benefit of others.
The second approach focused on self-reported trait prosociality, measured through surveys assessing personality characteristics such as honesty, empathy, altruism, and fairness. These traits reflect broader, dispositional tendencies to act prosocially across various contexts. Unlike the context-specific behaviors observed in the games, these measures captured stable individual differences in prosocial attitudes and inclinations.
The findings revealed that the relationship between political orientation and prosociality varied depending on the method of measurement. Trait prosociality showed a consistent and meaningful association with political orientation.
Participants with left-leaning ideologies scored higher on traits such as empathy and altruism, suggesting that their broader dispositional tendencies aligned with prosocial values. While these correlations were statistically significant, they were modest in size, indicating that political orientation explains only a small portion of the variance in trait prosociality.
“Our political attitudes are not only relevant for whom we vote, but they can also be related to social behavior more broadly, such as prosociality,” Thielmann told PsyPost. “Importantly, however, our results do not imply that having a more right-wing political orientation means that someone is automatically less prosocial.”
The results from the economic games were less consistent. Only one game, the Social Value Orientation task, showed a meaningful link between political orientation and prosocial behavior, with left-leaning individuals displaying slightly greater prosocial tendencies.
For the other games, such as the Dictator Game and Public Goods Game, the correlations were weak or negligible, suggesting that political orientation had little influence on observable prosocial actions in these contexts. The researchers noted that these games often capture narrow aspects of prosociality, which may explain their limited ability to detect broader ideological differences.
“We were surprised to see that, on the trait level, political orientation and prosociality were consistently correlated,” Thielmann said. “However, on the level of prosocial behavior, correlations with political orientation were pretty inconsistent and only apparent for some measures of behavioral prosociality.”
But the study, like all research, has some caveats. The data were collected exclusively in Germany, which, while providing a clear left-to-right ideological comparison, may not reflect the dynamics of other countries, such as the United States, where partisan divisions are more pronounced.
It is also important to note that while the results show correlations between left-leaning ideologies and greater prosocial tendencies, these patterns do not prove that political orientation directly influences prosocial behavior or traits.
“One major caveat is that, due to the cross-sectional design, we cannot draw causal conclusions,” Thielmann noted. “We can, therefore, not say whether political orientation affects prosociality or vice versa.”
Looking forward, Thielmann said that she and her colleagues “want to understand when and why political orientation is related to less/more prosocial behavior. For example, right-leaning individuals might be more selective than left-leaning individuals regarding who they behave prosocial towards. This, in turn, might be the result of a different motivation to act prosocially.”
The study, “Does a Left-Wing Political Orientation Really Go Along With Greater Prosociality? A Large-Scale Empirical Investigation,” was authored by Bernhard Schubach and Isabel Thielmann.
