Testing for Altruism and Social Pressure in Charitable Giving

Abstract

Every year, 90 percent of Americans give money or time to charities. Is such generosity necessarily welfare enhancing? We present a theoretical framework that pinpoints two types of motivation: individuals like to give, e.g., due to altruism or warm glow, or individuals would rather not give but dislike saying no, e.g., due to social pressure. To distinguish the two types of motivation, we design a door-to-door fund-raising drive in which we vary the ability of households to seek or avoid a solicitor. Some households are informed about the exact time of solicitation with a flyer on the door-knob; thus, they can seek the fund-raiser if giving is welfare-enhancing, and avoid it if giving is welfare-decreasing. We find that the flyer reduces the share of households opening the door by 10 to 25 percent, suggesting that the average household seeks to avoid fund-raisers. Moreover, if the flyer allows checking a box for 'Do Not Disturb' giving is 30 percent lower. The latter decrease is concentrated among donations smaller than $10. These findings suggest that both types of motivation affect charitable giving, with more evidence supporting the social pressure explanation. Combining reduced form insights from these treatments with data gathered from a complementary field experiment, we are able to structurally estimate altruism and social pressure parameters.

Motives for sharing in social networks

“…Thus we offer 'social norms' as a synonym, but that phrase seems to mean different things to different people. A third alternative is 'social pressure,' as in DellaVigna et al (2011), but this too seems to carry a somewhat negative connotation. We take comfort from the fact that all three of these begin with the letter 'S,' and henceforth use 'sanctions' without apology.…”

“…For example, List et al (2004), Leider et al (2009), andDellaVigna et al (2011) try to measure the 'why' of sharing, and find that social pressure and incentive-based motives are important. Barr and Genicot (2008) and Attanasio et al (2009) try to understand the 'who' of sharing.…”

Do fairness and race matter in generosity? Evidence from a nationally representative charity experiment

“…Our experiment is an artefactual field experiment because we use broadly representative subjects (Harrison and List, 2004). We see our paper as complementary to field experiments, which typically meet all desiderata except the third (Frey and Meier, 2004;Croson and Shang, 2009;Landry et al, 2006;Falk, 2007;Karlan and List, 2007;Eckel and Grossman, 2008;DellaVigna et al, 2009;List and Price, 2009;Meer, 2009).…”

Untitled

“…Charitable donation and social evaluation are complex phenomena, and we expect that multiple mechanisms contribute to their genesis and expression under different conditions. For example, given the long-standing debate over the extent to which selfreported Agreeableness reflects social desirability (Graziano and Tobin, 2002;Ones et al, 1996), it is possible that the results we observe were driven in part by Agreeable participants' desire to manage social impressions-i.e., that in a context where donations were made completely anonymously, we would observe dissimilar (or no) relationships between Agreeableness and charitable giving (DellaVigna et al, 2012;Izuma et al, 2010). Moreover, the moderating influence of Agreeableness we observed is itself likely to depend on other factors that were unmeasured in the present study.…”