Sure-thing vs. probabilistic charitable giving: Experimental evidence on the role of individual differences in risky and ambiguous charitable decision-making

Abstract

Charities differ, among other things, alongside the likelihood that their interventions succeed and produce the desired outcomes and alongside the extent that such likelihood can even be articulated numerically. In this paper, we investigate what best explains charitable giving behaviour regarding charities that have interventions that will succeed with a quantifiable and high probability (sure-thing charities) and charities that have interventions that only have a small and hard to quantify probability of bringing about the desired end (probabilistic charities). We study individual differences in risk/ambiguity attitudes, empathy, numeracy, optimism, and donor type (warm glow vs. pure altruistic donor type) as potential predictors of this choice. We conduct a money incentivised, pre-registered experiment on Prolific on a representative UK sample (n = 1,506) to investigate participant choices (i) between these two types of charities and (ii) about one randomly selected charity. Overall, we find little to no evidence that individual differences predict choices regarding decisions about sure-thing and probabilistic charities, with the exception that a purely altruistic donor type predicts donations to probabilistic charities when participants were presented with a randomly selected charity in (ii). Conducting exploratory equivalence tests, we find that the data provide robust evidence in favour of the absence of an effect (or a negligibly small effect) where we fail to reject the null. This is corroborated by exploratory Bayesian analyses. We take this paper to be contributing to the literature on charitable giving via this comprehensive null-result in pursuit of contributing to a cumulative science.

Wellbeing and Prosocial Crowdfunding for Achieving Sustainable Development Goals

“…These values help people see their connection to others and the impact they can have on the world. The findings of this study are particularly useful for non-profit organizations that seek to attract and retain individual charitable donors and may also help to increase revenue frequency, obtain higher amounts of resources, and solicit donations to both religious and secular organizations (Schoenegger & Costa-Gomes, 2022).…”

Investigating (sequential) unit asking: An unsuccessful quest for scope sensitivity in willingness to donate judgments

“…While research has found that reliance on hypothetical donations increases mean donations (Bekkers, 2017), to our knowledge, there is no evidence that hypotheticality influences differences between conditions in WTD judgments. Finally, incentive compatible studies typically provide an endowment and ask participants to donate a proportion of this (e.g., Schoenegger & Costa‐Gomes, 2022; Small et al, 2007), which is a considerably different task from the majority of real‐life donation decisions. Given that our participants appeared to take the WTD task seriously (as evidenced above), we would see such an incentive compatible task as more different from real donation decisions than our hypothetical tasks, especially as it induces an upper bound on how much participants can donate (the endowment), which would make it more difficult to study scope sensitivity.…”