Rising socioeconomic inequalities around the world make it important to understand how people make sense of disparities of wealth and opportunity, how religious worldviews affect these explanations, and the implications for prosocial responses to those in need. In three high-powered, preregistered studies, I will compare karmic attributions for misfortune (a culturally-evolved supernatural belief that actions result in morally-congruent outcomes) to naturalistic attributions for one’s status (internal and external, such as hard work vs. discrimination).  Studies 1 and 2 investigate whether causal attributions predict giving to recipients who differ in their perceived deservingness and need of help.  These studies should replicate the previously-documented pattern of reduced helping when low status is attributed to internal, personal failings (a naturalistic explanation), in novel cultural contexts where belief in karma (a supernatural explanation) is widespread.  Studies 1 and 2 also experimentally prime thoughts of karma, to address open theoretical questions about whether karma encourages universal prosociality or selective prosociality (e.g., via attributions of personal responsibility, which increase giving to deserving recipients and decrease giving to underserving recipients).  Study 3 manipulates the salience of natural and supernatural explanations for poverty that are internal or external, and measures giving to low-SES targets, as a further experimental test of how religious and scientific meaning-making systems interact to predict responses to those in need.  All studies will recruit Indian Hindus, Singapore Buddhists, and American Christians, to assess generalizability across cultural contexts that vary in their dominant religious traditions and prevalent cultural narratives surrounding social inequalities.