Understanding the Social Science Effect: An Intervention in Life Course Generosity

Abstract

Does interacting with social science data in early adulthood promote generosity? To investigate this question from a life course development perspective, two distinct samples were drawn for a survey with an embedded experimental design. The first sample is of emerging adult college students ( n = 30, median age = 20 years). The second sample is of young adults who were selected to participate based on their prior participation in a nationally representative and longitudinal study ( n = 170, median age = 31 years). Toward the end of the survey, participants were randomly selected into a website interaction with either: (a) data on charitable giving, (b) data on social inequality, or (c) data about weather (a control condition). The key outcome of interest is a behavioral measure of generosity: whether participants elected to keep their study incentive or donate their incentive to a charitable organization. The donation decision occurred after the randomly selected website interaction. Interacting with charitable giving data resulted in greater generosity than interacting with weather data, across both samples. Interacting with social inequality data had mixed results. Moreover, emerging adult college students gave at a considerably higher rate overall than the national sample of young adults, net of treatment type. Implications are discussed.

Does Religious Belief Affect Volunteering and Donating Behavior of Chinese College Students?

“…A field experiment carried out in a Swedish university demonstrated that descriptive social norms increased charitable giving of college students and the effect of local social norms of one's immediate environment is more powerful than that of global social norms (Agerström et al 2016). Another experimental study carried out in the United States also confirmed the effect of social norms on donation (Herzog et al 2019). Research on Chinese college students investigated and substantiated the effect of social norms on volunteering (Huang 2020;Luo et al 2012).…”