Thoughts and prayers or Thoughts and payers: Disentangling prosociality from virtue signalling. Experimental design stage

with Konstantinos Ioannidis and Johannes Lohse

Funded by the economics Keynes fund - University of Cambridge

Abstract:

We ask whether extrinsic motivations are crowding out intrinsic motivations to donate. We use an online experiment with two treatments. Our first treatment varies whether participants choose whether to either donate (costly action), pledge (cheap talk), or donate and pledge to a cause. We conjecture that the opportunity to share a pledge without donating is sufficient to satisfy image concerns, resulting in lower donations. Our second treatment aims at disentangling the mechanisms driving this behaviour. Our second treatment varies whether actions are unobserved (self image concerns), observed after others have made their decisions (social image concerns), or observed before others have made their decisions (signalling). We conjecture that the substitution effect away from donations will be more pronounced when social image and signalling motives are active. Our results will provide evidence for campaign managers and charity organisations on whether extrinsic motivations, such as sharing your pledge to a cause on social media, can crowd out intrinsic motivations to donate and whether the lost donations in this setting can be recovered by allowing pledges only after donations.