Directions for Further Understanding Generous Practices
Generosity is both an identity and a social act and reflects an underlying emotional exchange in social relationships. (1) Acts of generosity are socially paradoxical and benefit both the giver and the receiver. (2,3) In this study we take a closer look at the concept of generosity and how people think about and have experienced generosity. The purpose of this project was to understand the complex contexts and practices of individual generosity based on a review of the existing literature. The research design that we used in our study is a literature review. We used interdisciplinary literature from 1950 to the present in order to compare how the concept of generosity has changed over time. The majority of studies that used experimentally-based methods were guided by perspectives in psychology and used U.S. adult populations.