.png){kind=icon}
.png){kind=icon}
Return
Merely Increasing Bids Increases Charitable Donation
.png){kind=icon}
PRE
AI
DOI：10.1037/xap0000531.png)
.png){kind=icon}
Original request for help.png){kind=icon}
Share.png){kind=icon}
Save
Abstract
En 中文
Amid a sea of requests for aid, what factors affect decisions to donate? Here, we investigate the efficacy of a manipulation of choice architecture to affect giving: increasing the number of bids available to donors to increase how much they give. Across six experiments (N = 6,153), participants recruited online responded to single- or multiple-bid donation requests. Viewing multiple bids for aid increased both intention to donate and actual donation without decreasing the proportion of people who donated at all. We rule out previously documented heuristics (i.e., 1/n, fairness), anchoring, and agency as explanations for our effect. Finally, we replicate our effect in a natural experiment (N = 10,000 donors): Presenting donors, giving their own money, with multiple bids increased the average donation by $8.77 (a 19.7% increase). Our findings have theoretical implications for invigorating prosocial behavior and offer practical suggestions for how charitable organizations can better engineer solicitations for aid. Public Significance StatementPeople contribute hundreds of billions of dollars annually to charitable causes via online fundraisingplatforms. Many of these platforms allow people to make a single donation which is then divided anddistributed to many charitable causes, removing the need for people to spend time choosing betweenmultiple deserving recipients. But could presenting aid requests in this manner actually render fundraisingcampaigns less effective? In the present experiments, we reliablyfind that listing multiple causes in anappeal for aid increases donation amounts without decreasing the proportion of people who donate. Wealso establish the real-world relevance of this manipulation through a large-scale natural experiment,which showed that presenting donors with multiple-cause aid requests increased the average donation bynearly 20%. Findings indicate that fundraising campaigns could increase their donations by billionsof dollars annually, if they present donors with multiple-cause aid requests after bringing them to thedonation page.
Keywords:
altruism
donation
choice architecture
decision-making
Journal
IF:
2.1
Papers:
21
Citations:
3.0K
Organization
No organization information available