Altruistic or selfish? Responses when safety is threatened depend on childhood socioeconomic status

Abstract Altruism is an effective method of coping with threats. This research explored the relationship between childhood socioeconomic status (SES) and altruism under different situations. The results of five studies provided reliable evidence that safety‐threat conditions moderated the relationship between childhood SES and altruism. Individuals with higher childhood SES exhibited higher altruistic intentions (Studies 1 and 2) and behaviors (Study 3) when they were manipulated to imagine a safety threat scenario (Study 1), when viewing pictures of disasters (Study 2), and when they were manipulated to believe that their health was under threat (Study 3). However, their childhood SES had no significant impact on their altruistic intentions and behaviors in relatively safe environments (Studies 1–3). This effect was again tested in more realistic environmental conditions using a large‐scale survey in Study 4. In Study 5, we explored the underlying mechanism behind the earlier findings (i.e., temporal discounting).