Let Me Think About It: How More Choices Boost Charitable Giving

We ran an online experiment (N=3,200) investigating the effect of choice on charitable giving. Participants were endowed with 200 tokens which represented £2.50 in real money (100 tokens = £1.25). They can then choose whether to donate the money to charities, or whether they will keep it for themselves. They are allowed to donate as much or as little money as they like, and the money donated was sent to the charities after the experiment was completed. Each participant also received a rate of £10/hour participation fee and the experiment was 15 minutes. Participants are allowed to drop out before the experiment proper, an option which 200 participants took. They keep all the money without taking part in the rest of the experiment at all, save for a short demographic questionnaire and a few follow up questions asking why they left. Participants were reassured throughout the experiment that they were allowed to keep all the money for themselves and the experiment was not investigating selfish behaviour. Even when in the experiment proper, donating 0 is always an option. The experiment proceeds as follows. Each participant has two rounds of donations, for each of which they have 100 tokens. You cannot carry tokens over to the second round. In each round, participants are randomly allocated between having a ‘high’ number of charities to donate to (40) and a ‘low’ number of charities to donate to (5). In addition, participants are randomly allocated to one of four treatments which remain the same across the whole experiment (for them): (1) The 1Choice arm, where they can choose one out of a list of charities to donate to. (2) The MChoice arm, where they can split their donation between multiple charities. (3) The 1ChoiceDefault arm, where they can choose only one charity and a default option is pre-selected for them. (4) The Perceived Importance arm, where they see how many charities are devoted to a given cause before they pick it. The Perceived Importance arm is slightly different to the others because there is only one round as the subjects choose the cause out of four categories. There are multiple specific charities and donation purposes within each cause. The causes are: Animal Welfare, Housing and Hunger, Children & Youth, and Health & Medicine. The number of options (5 or 40) within each of these four causes is displayed in the Perceived Importance arm only. After the experiment, participants are asked a series of demographic questions, as well as questions about their choices including their satisfaction, how difficult the choice was, and other candidate moderators/mediators.