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Unit Asking: A Method to Boost Donations and Beyond
Christopher Hsee et al.
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
The solicitation of charitable donations costs billions of dollars annually. Here, we introduce a virtually costless method for boosting charitable donations to a group of needy persons: merely asking donors to indicate a hypothetical amount for helping one of the needy persons before asking donors to decide how much to donate for all of the needy persons. We demonstrated, in both real fund-raisers and scenario-based research, that this simple unit-asking method greatly increases donations for the group of needy persons. Different from phenomena such as the foot-in-the-door and identifiable-victim effects, the unit-asking effect arises because donors are initially scope insensitive and subsequently scope consistent. The method applies to both traditional paper-based fund-raisers and increasingly popular Web-based fund-raisers and has implications for domains other than fund-raisers, such as auctions and budget proposals. Our research suggests that a subtle manipulation based on psychological science can generate a substantial effect in real life.
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Goal Gradient in Helping Behavior
Cynthia Cryder, George Loewenstein & Howard Seltman
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
People are more likely to pitch in as charitable campaigns approach their goals. Such "goal gradient helping" occurs in part because late-stage efforts provide donors with a heightened sense of personal impact, an influential source of satisfaction from prosocial acts. Using web robot technology in an Internet field study of micro-lending, Study 1 demonstrated that charity contribution rates increase as recipients approach their fundraising goals. Study 2, a large-scale field experiment, found that funds close to reaching campaign goals received more donations than did funds far from reaching campaign goals. Study 3 replicated the goal gradient helping effect in a controlled scenario experiment, and mediational analyses showed that increased perceived impact of late-stage contributions, and the resultant satisfaction from this impact, explain goal gradient helping. In conclusion, people are not charitable simply to be kind or to relieve negative emotions; they find satisfaction from having personal influence in solving a social problem.
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Cooperation in Ethnically Diverse Neighborhoods: A Lost-Letter Experiment
Ruud Koopmans & Susanne Veit
Political Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Several studies suggest a negative impact of ethnic diversity on cooperation, but most of them rely on attitudinal and other indirect measurements of cooperation or are derived from the artificial laboratory setting. We conducted a field experiment based on the lost-letter technique across 52 neighborhoods in Berlin, Germany. The study has two aims. First, we investigate whether the negative effect of ethnic heterogeneity on cooperation holds for concrete cooperative behavior in a real-world setting. Second, we test the most prominent psychological mechanism that has been proposed to explain the negative effects of heterogeneity on cooperation, namely in-group favoritism. We do so by experimentally varying the ethnicity and religion of the senders of letters. We find strong support for the negative effect of ethnic diversity on cooperation. We find no evidence, however, of in-group favoritism. Letters from Turkish or Muslim organizations were as often returned as those from German and Christian organizations, and the ethnic diversity effect was the same for all types of letters.
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Mikael Knutsson, Peter Martinsson & Conny Wollbrant
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, forthcoming
Abstract:
We use a natural field experiment to investigate the hypothesis that generosity is partly involuntary, by examining whether individuals tend to avoid opportunities to act generously. In Sweden, new recycling machines for bottles and cans with an option of donating the returned deposit to charity were gradually introduced in one of the largest store chains. We find a substantial decline in recycling the month these new machines were introduced and a further decline in the following months. These results indicate that individuals avoid opportunities to act generously and corroborate findings from both lab and field studies supporting the claim that generous behavior is partly involuntary.
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The effect of receipt personalization on tipping behavior
Brian Kinard & Jerry Kinard
Journal of Consumer Behaviour, July/August 2013, Pages 280-284
Abstract:
Research has shown that personalizing receipts, such as drawing "smiley faces" and writing "thank you" notes on customer bills to express gratitude, can result in larger tips for restaurant wait staff. Although the practice of receipt personalization has been supported using field experiments, limited research has examined the effectiveness of this technique based on the level of service quality provided by restaurant wait staff. Using a scenario-based approach, we found from this study that adding a personalized message significantly lowers tip percentages. Moreover, the negative effect is magnified when service quality fails to exceed customer expectations. Implications related to the findings are discussed.
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The effect of employees' verbal mimicry on tipping
Céline Jacob & Nicolas Guéguen
International Journal of Hospitality Management, December 2013, Pages 109-111
Abstract:
van Baaren et al. (2003) found that a waitress who mimicked their patrons by repeating their order received significantly larger tips. In this study, we tried to replicate these results by testing the effect of repetition after a delay between the customer's initial order and the repetition. A waitress was instructed to mimic or not half of their customers by repeating their order verbatim when she brought the order to the table. Mimicry increased the frequency in tipping and the amount of money left by the customers.
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Helping with all your heart: The effect of cardioid dishes on tipping behavior
Nicolas Guéguen
Journal of Applied Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Some studies have shown that figurative cues, presented in the immediate environment of an individual, affect his/her later behavior. This effect was studied in a tipping behavior context. In three restaurants, each bill was placed under a dish, which had a cardioid shape, a round shape, or a square shape. Results showed that more tips were left in the bill dish with the cardioid shape. The activation spreading theory is used to explain these results.
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Failure to Demonstrate That Playing Violent Video Games Diminishes Prosocial Behavior
Morgan Tear & Mark Nielsen
PLoS ONE, July 2013
Background: Past research has found that playing a classic prosocial video game resulted in heightened prosocial behavior when compared to a control group, whereas playing a classic violent video game had no effect. Given purported links between violent video games and poor social behavior, this result is surprising. Here our aim was to assess whether this finding may be due to the specific games used. That is, modern games are experienced differently from classic games (more immersion in virtual environments, more connection with characters, etc.) and it may be that playing violent video games impacts prosocial behavior only when contemporary versions are used.
Methods and Findings: Experiments 1 and 2 explored the effects of playing contemporary violent, non-violent, and prosocial video games on prosocial behavior, as measured by the pen-drop task. We found that slight contextual changes in the delivery of the pen-drop task led to different rates of helping but that the type of game played had little effect. Experiment 3 explored this further by using classic games. Again, we found no effect.
Conclusions: We failed to find evidence that playing video games affects prosocial behavior. Research on the effects of video game play is of significant public interest. It is therefore important that speculation be rigorously tested and findings replicated. Here we fail to substantiate conjecture that playing contemporary violent video games will lead to diminished prosocial behavior.
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Eye images increase generosity, but not for long: The limited effect of a false cue
Adam Sparks & Pat Barclay
Evolution and Human Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
People are more cooperative when explicitly observed, and simply exposing people to images of eyes or faces has been shown to increase cooperation of various types and in various contexts, albeit with notable, if controversial, exceptions. This ‘eyes effect' is important both for its potential real-world applications and for its implications regarding the role of reputation in the evolution and maintenance of human cooperation. Based on the general principle that organisms eventually cease responding to uninformative stimuli, we predicted that the eyes effect would be eliminated by prolonged exposure. A novel experiment confirmed that participants exposed briefly to an eye-like image gave more money in an economic game than those in a longer exposure condition and those in a control condition. There was no generosity difference between the long exposure and control conditions. Furthermore, a meta-analysis of 25 eyes effects experiments confirmed that the effect emerges reliably after short exposures to eye images, but not after long exposures. An understanding of the limits of false cues on behaviour helps resolve empirical discrepancies regarding the eyes effect and exonerates the importance of reputation even in anonymous, one-shot interactions.
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Involuntary volunteering: The impact of mandated service in public schools
Sara Helms
Economics of Education Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
In 1992, Maryland became the first - and only - state to require service activity of all public high school graduates. Proponents of mandates note that since individual volunteer activity is correlated over time, mandates will create lifetime volunteers. Prior studies demonstrate differences in the observed characteristics of volunteers and nonvolunteers which could drive the correlation in service over time. Using restricted-access data from the Monitoring the Future project, I find the mandate increased volunteering among eighth-grade students. However, the mandate likely reduced volunteering among twelfth-grade students. In contrast to creating lifelong volunteers, my results suggest that the mandate changed the timing of volunteering.
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Do Business Executives Give More to Their Alma Mater? Longitudinal Evidence from a Large University
Phanindra Wunnava & Albert Okunade
American Journal of Economics and Sociology, July 2013, Pages 761-778
Abstract:
The novel contribution of this research is the examination of the gift-giving patterns of alumni business executives of a large urban public university. Our results reinforce the earlier findings that male alumni in Greek social organizations gave more to their alma mater. New insights unique to this study are that alumni with the higher-order executive job titles are more charitable. Further, the number of known other gift-giving alumni and friends seems to positively impact giving. The national athletic championship wins are also significant positive drivers of alumni giving in the championship year, as well as in the succeeding nonchampionship year.
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Tournament Outcomes and Prosocial Behaviour
Michael Kidd, Aaron Nicholas & Birendra Rai
Journal of Economic Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Does participation in a tournament influence prosocial behaviour in subsequent interactions? We designed an experiment to collect data on charitable donations made by participants out of their earnings from a real-effort tournament. We varied the earnings associated with ranks across our treatments thereby allowing us to observe donations by participants who end up at different ranks but have the same earnings. Prior to finding out how well they performed, participants were also asked to report their expected rank. Controlling for differences in effort and earnings, participants who were ranked first donated significantly more than others, supporting the view that positive affect from winning may increase generosity. However, we find that this effect diminishes when the difference between realised and expected ranks are controlled for, lending support to the idea that positive surprise from winning also increases generosity.
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Experiencing a Natural Disaster Alters Children's Altruistic Giving
Yiyuan Li et al.
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Altruism is thought to be a major contributor to the development of large-scale human societies. However, much of the evidence supporting this belief comes from individuals living in pacific and often affluent environments. It is entirely unknown whether humans act altruistically when facing adversity. Adversity is arguably a common human experience (as manifested in, e.g., personal tragedies, political upheavals, and natural disasters). In the research reported here, we found that experiencing a natural disaster affected children's altruistic giving. Immediately after witnessing devastations caused by a major earthquake, 9-year-olds became more altruistic. In addition, the more empathic they were, the more they gave. In contrast, experiencing a major earthquake caused 6-year-olds to be more selfish. Three years after the earthquake, children's altruistic tendencies returned to pre-earthquake levels, which suggests that changes in children's altruistic giving are an acute response to the immediate aftermath of a major natural disaster. These findings suggest that environmental insults and empathy play crucial roles in human altruism.
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Scott Stoltenberg, Christa Christ & Gustavo Carlo
Social Neuroscience, forthcoming
Abstract:
There is growing evidence that the serotonin system influences prosocial behavior. We examined whether anxiety mediated the association between variation in the serotonin transporter gene regulatory region (5-HTTLPR) and prosocial behavior. We collected self-reported tendencies to avoid certain situations and history of helping others using standard instruments and buccal cells for standard 5-HTTLPR genotyping from 398 undergraduate students. Triallelic 5-HTTLPR genotype was significantly associated with prosocial behavior and the effect was partially mediated by social anxiety, such that those carrying the S′ allele reported higher levels of social avoidance and lower rates of helping others. These results are consistent with accounts of the role of serotonin on anxiety and prosocial behavior and suggest that targeted efforts to reduce social anxiety in S′ allele carriers may enhance prosocial behavior.
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John Seiter & Harry Weger
Journal of Applied Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study examined whether different forms of address used by food servers were related to customers' tipping behavior. Food servers addressed diners who paid with credit cards by their first names, titles plus last names, sir/ma'am, or no address. Results indicated that when food servers personalized their service by addressing their customers by name, they earned significantly higher tips than when they used less immediate forms of address, although customers' estimated age mediated these results.