People in North Carolina are pretty stingy compared to other Americans. That’s according to a Gallup poll showing that a little more than half — 55 percent — of North Carolinians said they had donated money in the past month, the lowest of any state.

Now we have two different measures of generosity for each state. The philanthropy study shows the total amount donated in each state in 2008 (which we can use to calculate per capita donations), while the Gallup poll shows the percentage of people who say they have given money. This comparison doesn’t show that those in certain states are lying — it merely highlights the difference between how many people say they have given to charity and a rough estimate of how much people are actually digging into their pockets. Do they correlate?

At the top of the most-charitable list, survey responses and giving match up. As a state, Utah gave $2.4 billion in 2012; that doesn’t seem like much compared with other places (Tennessee gave $2.7 billion), but Utah’s annual donations per capita ($827) were the highest in the country.

Read the full article by Mona Chalabi about American Generosity from FiveThirtyEight