Feeling Good about Giving 15
altruistic reasons; moreover, mixed markets - where both social and economic incentives are
present - look like economic markets, as though the mere whiff of monetary incentives corrupts
social motivations (Heyman & Ariely, 2004).
How might these dynamics play out specifically in the domain of charitable giving?
While researchers have only recently devoted attention to this issue, early results suggest that
mixing economic incentives with social incentives may have similar effects as in other domains.
At a general level, the mere thought of money undermines people’s motivation to engage in
prosocial behavior (Vohs, Mead, & Goode, 2006), and several investigations have demonstrated
the negative impact of mixing incentives with charitable giving. For example, Falk (2007)
examined the impact of sending gifts to possible donors on their frequency and amount of
donation. Small gifts increased donations by 17% and large gifts by 75%, but people who
received large gifts were more likely to donate smaller amounts, while those who received no
gift were most likely to donate large amounts; while only suggestive, these results imply that
receiving gifts may crowd out some inherent motivation to give. Two investigations that
explored the impact of matching donations - in which an employer or other agency matches the
amount of one’s donation to some charity - showed that matching did increase people’s
likelihood of contributing (Karlan & List, 2007; Meier, 2007). Importantly, however, Meier
(2007) showed that while initial contribution rates increased, contribution rates actually declined
after the matching offer ended, leading to a net loss in giving. Again, these results suggest that
providing people with external incentives to give - a matching donation, or a gift - may
undermine some of their intrinsic interest in giving in the longer term.
But does advertising the mood benefits of charitable acts alter the reasons and outcomes
of donating? Specifically, we wondered whether the effects we demonstrated in Dunn et al.