Does Air Pollution Affect Prosocial Behaviour?

Abstract

Air pollution has become a serious issue that affects billions of people worldwide. The relationship between air pollution and social behaviour has become one of the most widely discussed topics in the academic community. While the link between air pollution and risk-averse and unethical behaviours has been explored extensively, the relationship between air pollution and prosocial behaviour has been examined less thoroughly. Individual blood donation is a typical form of prosocial behaviour. We examined the effect of air pollution on prosocial behaviour using the Poisson regression quasi-maximum likelihood (PQML) based on the panel data related to air pollution and blood donations. We also employed a set of control variables and robustness checks. The findings indicate that air pollution does not affect whole blood donation, although it does affect component blood donation. We also find that the effect of air pollution on blood donation is heterogeneous in terms of gender, age, and other factors. These results show that the relationship between air pollution and prosocial behaviour is limited. Not all types of prosocial behaviour are affected by air pollution, perhaps because air pollution affects only specific psychological motivations and because different types of prosocial behaviour have different motivations.