How does social information affect charitable giving?: Empathic concern promotes support for underdog recipient

Intergroup Empathy: How Does Race Affect Empathic Neural Responses?

How does race affect the human ability to share and respond to the suffering of others? Recent evidence provides novel insight into how and why race alters empathic neural response.

Does Competition Affect Giving?∗

Charities often devise fund-raising strategies that exploit natural human competitiveness in combination with the desire for public recognition. We explore whether institutions promoting competition can affect altruistic giving even when possibilities for public acclaim are minimal. In a controlled laboratory experiment based on a sequential “dictator game”, we find that subjects tend to give m...

Charitable Giving

In 2005 charitable giving in the United States totaled over $260 billon, or around 1.9% of personal income, making it a significant fraction of the economy. Individual giving accounted for 77% of this total, while foundations accounted for 12%, bequests for 7%, and corporations for 5% (Giving USA, 2006). Almost 70% of US households report giving to charity. While the US typically has one of the...

Charitable Giving

Testing for altruism and social pressure in charitable giving.

Every year, 90% of Americans give money to charities. Is such generosity necessarily welfare enhancing for the giver? We present a theoretical framework that distinguishes two types of motivation: individuals like to give, for example, due to altruism or warm glow, and individuals would rather not give but dislike saying no, for example, due to social pressure. We design a door-to-door fund-rai...