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Investigation into charitable giving
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SOMETIMES we might wonder: Why do we help a complete stranger? Or, why do we give money to help people who are miles away or even on a different continent? What are some motivations for charitable giving, and how do these motivations shape people’s behavior?
Last winter, I was able to be in part of the Harvard evolutionary psychology lab to help further understand what aspects of a charitable action can influence peoples’ likelihood to consider efficiency.
Since the evolutionary logic of charitable giving is about building a good reputation through donations, the study contains several conditions that make the participants think about how other people might consider them. In the study, we want to know whether making people’s donation information public, such as how much money they give, how much impact they make, or how much time they use, can affect people’s behavior. During several months, over 264 people came to the lab to participate in the study. Each of them is given US$10 and they can choose to keep or donate any of the amount with access to sufficient information about the charities they faced.
After analyzing the data, we found out that people do donate more money and search longer when they know their record will be made public. However, their actual impact, or efficiency, did not improve in any of those designed conditions. While people use how much effort someone spends to assign him or her a reputation for doing charity, they care much less about how much good work is actually being done.
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