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A field study on the role of incidental emotions on charitable giving

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Abstract

Many important social and political goals are at least partially funded by charitable donations (e.g. environmental, public health, and educational). Recently a number of laboratory experiments have shown that a potential donor’s incidental emotions—those felt at the time of the decision but unrelated to the decision itself—are important factors. We extend these findings by examining the effect of incidental emotions on charitable giving using a natural field experiment, where the potential donors are unaware of the intervention. In partnership with a pledge drive at a small national liberal arts college, we demonstrate that participants who were asked to recall a person or event that has benefited them since graduating, pledged larger amounts (an increase of 92%) compared to the control group, although the probability of making a pledge was statistically no different.

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Due to the private nature of fund raising, the authors have not been given permission to share data.

Notes

  1. Natural field experiments are those that occur in the natural decision making environment of the subject but where the subject is unaware they are a participant in an experiment. See List (2011) for a discussion of associated field experiment classifications, as well as Harrison and List (2004) and Levitt and List (2009) for a description of field experiments in economics more broadly. Such experiments benefit from the randomization of laboratory settings while maintaining the realism of the environment, decisions, and consequences of the subject’s actions and thus diminishing issues such as demand and Hawthorne effects.

  2. A similar methodology was used in Shang and Croson (2009) to examine the effect social information (how much others were donating) can have on charitable donations to a public radio station. In their study and ours, a short treatment intervention is presented immediately prior to the request for a donation. Instead of a request for autobiographical recall—as in this study—they inform the potential donor of the size of recent donations to the station.

  3. Despite this, the respondent may recall a beneficial event or relationship relative to the college since graduating—perhaps a serendipitous encounter at homecoming or relationship whose benefit did not manifest until years later.

  4. Typically the initial ask amount would begin at $100, but would be adjusted toward the respondent’s prior donation amount if such a donation had occurred.

  5. Given the skewness of pledge amount, we also tested the equality of median pledge across treatment and control groups. Median pledges are $25 and $7.25 for the treatment and control groups respectively. The Wilcoxon rank-sum test indicates these medians are statistically different at lower than the 5% level.

  6. The tobit regression accounts for effective censoring of pledges at $0.

  7. Estimation from a logistic regression show very similar results (not reported here).

  8. Kessler et al. (2021) (whose methodology is the most similar to our own) does not make a distinction, examining only donation magnitude.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Lycoming College, Williamsport, PA, 17701, USA

    Michael Kurtz

  2. Goucher College, Baltimore, MD, 21204, USA

    Steven Furnagiev

  3. Elizabethtown College, Elizabethtown, PA, 17022, USA

    Rebecca Forbes

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  1. Michael Kurtz
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  2. Steven Furnagiev
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  3. Rebecca Forbes
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Correspondence to Steven Furnagiev.

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This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors. The authors would like to thank Ben Priday and participants at the Southern Economic Conference (2018) for their helpful comments on an early draft of this paper as well as Charlie Hunt for his valuable research assistance.

Appendix

Appendix

Table 4 Treatment Effects; Pledge Amount, Tobit (Calls over 3 min)
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Table 5 Treatment effects; probability of pledge, probit marginal effects (calls over 3 min)
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Table 6 Pledge Amount and Probability of Pledge; Increasing Cut Time
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Kurtz, M., Furnagiev, S. & Forbes, R. A field study on the role of incidental emotions on charitable giving. Theory Decis 94, 167–181 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11238-022-09884-x

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