Sharing is caring? Disentangling prosociality from virtue signalling 

with Konstantinos Ioannidis and Johannes Lohse - (Experimental design stage)

Funded by the Keynes Fund for Applied Economics and the Leverhulme Trust

Abstract:

Social media platforms enable individuals to support charitable causes through both monetary donations and low-cost symbolic actions such as posting messages or expressing public support. While symbolic participation may crowd out donations by providing an alternative means of expressing support, visible expressions of support may also influence observers and increase giving. We study how opportunities for symbolic online engagement affect charitable donations using a pre-registered online experiment with a representative sample of 8,000 UK participants. The experiment varies both the availability of symbolic participation and the visibility of support decisions in a 2*3 design. This structure allows us to separately identify individual-level responses to symbolic participation and downstream social influence among observers within a common informational environment. Our findings contribute to the literatures on charitable giving, symbolic participation, and social influence, and provide evidence on how low-cost symbolic signals affect the voluntary provision of public goods.