Making a difference
The evaluability bias in charitable giving: Saving administration costs or saving lives?
Lucius Caviola et al.
Judgment and Decision Making, July 2014, Pages 303–315
Abstract:
We describe the “evaluability bias”: the tendency to weight the importance of an attribute in proportion to its ease of evaluation. We propose that the evaluability bias influences decision making in the context of charitable giving: people tend to have a strong preference for charities with low overhead ratios (lower administrative expenses) but not for charities with high cost-effectiveness (greater number of saved lives per dollar), because the former attribute is easier to evaluate than the latter. In line with this hypothesis, we report the results of four studies showing that, when presented with a single charity, people are willing to donate more to a charity with low overhead ratio, regardless of cost-effectiveness. However, when people are presented with two charities simultaneously — thereby enabling comparative evaluation — they base their donation behavior on cost-effectiveness (Study 1). This suggests that people primarily value cost-effectiveness but manifest the evaluability bias in cases where they find it difficult to evaluate. However, people seem also to value a low overhead ratio for its own sake (Study 2). The evaluability bias effect applies to charities of different domains (Study 3). We also show that overhead ratio is easier to evaluate when its presentation format is a ratio, suggesting an inherent reference point that allows meaningful interpretation (Study 4).
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Conscience Accounting: Emotion Dynamics and Social Behavior
Uri Gneezy, Alex Imas & Kristóf Madarász
Management Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper presents theory and experiments where people's prosocial attitudes fluctuate over time following the violation of an internalized norm. We report the results of two experiments in which people who first made an immoral choice were then more likely to donate to charity than those who did not. In addition, those who knew that a donation opportunity would follow the potentially immoral choice behaved more unethically than those who did not know. We interpret this increase in charitable behavior as being driven by a temporal increase in guilt induced by past immoral actions. We term such behavior conscience accounting and discuss its importance in charitable giving and in the identification of social norms in choice behavior through time inconsistency.
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Giving Against the Odds: When Tempting Alternatives Increase Willingness to Donate
Jennifer Savary, Kelly Goldsmith & Ravi Dhar
Journal of Marketing Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
The authors examine how a reference to an unrelated product in the choice context impacts consumers' likelihood of donating to charity. Building on research on self-signaling, the authors predict that consumers are more likely to give when the donation appeal references a hedonic product, as compared to when a utilitarian product is referenced or when no comparison is provided. They posit that this occurs because referencing a hedonic product during a charitable appeal changes the self-attributions, or self-signaling utility, associated with the choice to donate. A series of hypothetical and real choice experiments demonstrate the predicted effect, and show that the increase in donation rates occurs because the self-attributions signaled by a choice not to donate are more negative in the context of a hedonic reference product. Finally, consistent with these experimental findings, a field experiment shows that referencing a hedonic product during a charitable appeal increases real donation rates in a non-laboratory setting. The authors discuss theoretical implications for both consumer decision making and the self-signaling motives behind prosocial choice.
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Signaling Virtue: Charitable Behavior Under Consumer Elective Pricing
Minah Jung
University of California Working Paper, June 2014
Abstract:
Four field experiments examined the quantitative and qualitative forces influencing behaviors under consumer elective pricing called “shared social responsibility” (SSR, Gneezy, Gneezy, Nelson, & Brown, 2010). Under SSR consumers can pay what they want and a percentage of their payment goes to support a charitable cause. Customers in our experiments were sensitive to the presence of charitable giving, paying more when a portion of their payment went to charity (Studies 1-4), but were largely insensitive to what portion of their payment went to charity (Studies 1 and 2). To test possible explanations we examined how consumers’ qualitative concerns to signal a positive image influenced their decisions and found that neither self-selection into paying (Studies 3 and 4) nor social pressure (Study 4) explained higher payments under SSR.
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Priming Effects on Commitment to Help and on Real Helping Behavior
Costanza Scaffidi Abbate et al.
Basic and Applied Social Psychology, July/August 2014, Pages 347-355
Abstract:
Years of research on bystander apathy have demonstrated that the physical presence of others can reduce the tendency to help individuals needing assistance. Recent research on the implicit bystander effect has suggested that simply imagining the presence of others can lead to less helping behavior on a subsequent unrelated task. The present study was designed to contribute to previous findings on the implicit bystander effect by demonstrating these effects on commitment to help and on real helping behavior, rather than simply on intentions to help. Studies 1a and 1b demonstrate that merely priming participants with the construct of being in a group at Time 1 created significantly less commitment to future helping on a subsequent task at Time 2. Study 2 aimed to extend this effect to behavioral measures and verified that participants exposed to a group prime helped less than those who were exposed to a single-person prime. The implications of these findings for the literature on the bystander effect are discussed.
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The power of one: The relative influence of helpful and selfish models
Jerry Burger et al.
Social Influence, forthcoming
Abstract:
We compared the extent to which people imitate models who exhibit either helpful or selfish behavior. In Study 1, female shoppers witnessed an individual either help or not help a woman who dropped her books. Women who saw the helpful model were more likely to assist a confederate who dropped a dollar, whereas those who saw the unhelpful model assisted at a rate no different than the control condition. In Study 2, undergraduate women saw a confederate take either one or five pieces of candy after being instructed to take only one. Participants who witnessed the unselfish behavior took fewer pieces for themselves than control condition participants, whereas those who saw the selfish behavior did not differ from the control condition.
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Nicolás Somma
Acta Sociologica, August 2014, Pages 237-251
Abstract:
Although social movement organizations (SMOs) are often depicted as mobilizing intensive resources from their individual members, we lack a systematic assessment of this issue. Based on the notion of ‘modern social movements’ I argue that SMOs mobilize fewer human and monetary resources from their members than other voluntary organizations do. A regression model using a survey representative of American adults shows that, when compared to other organization members, SMO members generally contribute significantly lower amounts of money and time. They are also less likely to attend, plan or chair meetings, and give speeches on behalf of the organization. The only exception to this pattern is that SMO members are more likely to write letters for the organization than other members do.
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I’m Moral, but I Won’t Help You: The Distinct Roles of Empathy and Justice in Donations
Saerom Lee, Karen Page Winterich & William Ross
Journal of Consumer Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Donating to charitable causes is generally perceived as a moral, prosocial behavior, but this may not always be the case. Although moral identity tends to have a positive effect on prosocial behavior, moral identity does not unconditionally enhance charitable giving. Four studies demonstrate that moral identity decreases donations when recipients are responsible for their plight. Mediation analysis reveals that empathy and justice underlie these effects such that moral identity increases donations for recipients with low plight responsibility through increased empathy, but moral identity decreases donations to recipients with high plight responsibility due to perceptions of justice. Importantly, donations to recipients who are responsible for their plight can be enhanced when donors’ immorality is made salient, evoking empathy for recipients, particularly among donors with high moral identity. This research makes theoretical contributions in addition to providing implications for nonprofit organizations whose recipients may be perceived as responsible for their plight.
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Raj Chetty, Emmanuel Saez & Laszlo Sandor
Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2014, Pages 169-188
Abstract:
We evaluate policies to increase prosocial behavior using a field experiment with 1,500 referees at the Journal of Public Economics. We randomly assign referees to four groups: a control group with a six week deadline to submit a referee report, a group with a four week deadline, a cash incentive group rewarded with $100 for meeting the four week deadline, and a social incentive group in which referees were told that their turnaround times would be publicly posted. We obtain four sets of results. First, shorter deadlines reduce the time referees take to submit reports substantially. Second, cash incentives significantly improve speed, especially in the week before the deadline. Cash payments do not crowd out intrinsic motivation: after the cash treatment ends, referees who received cash incentives are no slower than those in the four-week deadline group. Third, social incentives have smaller but significant effects on review times and are especially effective among tenured professors, who are less sensitive to deadlines and cash incentives. Fourth, all the treatments have little or no effect on agreement rates, quality of reports, or review times at other journals. We conclude that small changes in journals’ policies could substantially expedite peer review at little cost. More generally, price incentives, nudges, and social pressure are effective and complementary methods of increasing prosocial behavior.
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Markus Paulus
Frontiers in Psychology, June 2014
Abstract:
Recent studies have provided evidence that young children already engage in sharing behavior. The underlying social-cognitive mechanisms, however, are still under debate. In particular, it is unclear whether or not young children’s sharing is motivated by an appreciation of others’ wealth. Manipulating the material needs of recipients in a sharing task (Experiment 1) and a resource allocation task (Experiment 2), we show that 5- but not 3-year-old children share more with poor than wealthy individuals. The 3-year-old children even showed a tendency to behave less selfishly towards the rich, yet not the poor recipient. This suggests that very early instances of sharing behavior are not motivated by a consideration of others’ material needs. Moreover, the results show that 5-year-old children were rather inclined to give more to the poor individual than distributing the resources equally, demonstrating that their wish to support the poor overruled the otherwise very prominent inclination to share resources equally. This indicates that charity has strong developmental roots in preschool children.