A disaster far away used to move money. An earthquake, a famine, a typhoon: appeals would go out, and donations would follow. Then Covid arrived, and according to a new working paper, that reflex weakened. Donors in the places where the virus hit hardest kept giving, but they gave differently. They gave nearer.
Esteban Jaimovich, Sarah Smith and Derrick Xu, writing in a preprint posted to arXiv at the end of July, set out to test an old question with new data: do people close ranks around their own group when a crisis hits? The idea has a name in the research literature, parochialism, meaning a tendency to favor your in-group over outsiders. It is usually studied with lab games or survey questions. The authors instead looked at something people actually did with their own money.
Their definition of in-group is deliberately simple, and that simplicity is what makes the study work. They drew the line geographically. A charity is either local to a donor or it is not. That turns a slippery psychological concept into something you can count in a dataset of donations, and it sidesteps the harder arguments about ethnicity, politics or identity that usually tangle up this kind of research.
What the team reports is a relative increase in giving to local charities during the pandemic. Two further pieces of evidence point the same way. Donors living in high-Covid areas increased their local giving, and those same donors became less responsive to international disasters. The pattern was strongest during the first year of the pandemic, and the authors describe it fading thereafter.
That timing matters for how you read the result. A permanent hardening of local loyalty would be one kind of finding. A sharp, temporary turn inward during the months when Covid was most frightening and most visible is another, and it is the one the paper describes. The authors' own interpretation leans on that: they attribute the shift to heightened concern about the immediate impact of Covid at a time when localities were salient. Local case counts were in the news. Local hospitals were the ones filling up. Local food banks were the ones running short.
What the study can and cannot tell you
The evidence available here is the arXiv abstract page for a preprint, which means the article you are reading is built on the authors' summary of their own work rather than on the full methods. The paper has not yet been through peer review. The abstract does not state the sample size, the country, the donation platform, the time window in dates, or how "local" and "high-Covid" were drawn on a map. Those choices matter a great deal to how large the effect is, and readers should treat the size of the shift as unspecified rather than small or large.
What also cannot be settled from the summary is why individual donors changed. The authors offer salience as their interpretation, not as a demonstrated mechanism. Other explanations sit close by. People may have learned about local need for the first time, or local charities may simply have asked more loudly and more often. A donor whose income was suddenly uncertain might prefer to see where the money lands. The paper's own language is careful here, and it is worth matching that care: the finding is a pattern in behavior, and the reason behind it is a reading the authors find plausible.
Why it matters
Charitable giving is one of the few places where moral priorities leave a paper trail. People rarely tell a pollster that a stranger overseas matters less to them than a neighbor. But donations are a choice made with real money, made privately, and recorded. That makes them an unusually honest measure of who counts as "us" at a given moment.
The practical stakes fall on organizations that work at a distance. International aid charities depend on people in wealthy countries responding to emergencies they will never see. If a domestic crisis makes that response go quiet, the effect lands on people already at the sharp end of a different disaster, and it lands at exactly the moment when competing appeals are hardest to hear. The pattern this paper documents suggests the attention available for faraway suffering is not fixed. It can contract.
There is a more hopeful reading alongside that one. Nothing here suggests people became less generous. The evidence points to redirected generosity rather than diminished generosity, and to a redirection that eased as the emergency did. If parochialism during a crisis is a temporary narrowing of the circle rather than a permanent redrawing of it, then the question for anyone raising money across borders is one of timing and framing, not of a durably shrunken audience.
The broader claim, that crises pull people inward toward their own, has been argued for decades on thinner evidence. This paper adds a real behavioral trace to it. Whether the pattern holds up in the full published version, and how big it turns out to be, is still open.