The Adverse Effect of Choice in Donation Decisions

Abstract

Many charitable organizations offer potential donors the option to choose their donation recipients-suggesting that organizations perceive the availability of such choice as beneficial to donation raising. Building upon research on choice aversion in the context of consumer goods and on the identifiable victim effect in the context of donation giving, we propose that the need to choose one target among multiple needy targets might, in fact, hinder donations. Results of six studies show that when prospective donors are asked to choose between two similar donation targets, they are more likely to opt out of donating altogether than when asked to donate to a single target. We show that the effect of choice on opt-out rates in donation settings is driven by the conflict between the wish to be helpful and the wish to be fair. We further show that when the conflict is resolved and the choice does not raise fairness concerns, the effect is attenuated and opt-out rates decline.

The Influence of Proportion Dominance and Global Need Perception on Donations

“…Future research could explore how such initial choices have a downstream effect on choices that directly influence donation recipients. For example, past research has shown that choosing between two similar donation recipients leads to choice aversion ( Ein-Gar et al, 2021 ). Future research can explore whether initially choosing a charitable cause reduces a donor’s tendency to opt-out of choosing a donation recipient.…”

“…When the choice is between two single people in need, donors may face a moral dilemma between the wish to help and the wish to do so in a fair manner. When fairness concerns arise, 35–50% of prospective donors decide to avoid choosing altogether ( Ein-Gar et al, 2021 ). However, if the two people in need differ on some attribute such as gender or physical attractiveness, then donors are more likely to choose one over the other, basing their decision on peripheral attributes such as beauty ( Cryder et al, 2017 ) or gender ( Bareket et al, 2022 ; Ein-Gar et al, 2022 ).…”

“…Thus, for example, the well-established effect of the identifiable victim ( Kogut and Ritov, 2005 ) suggests that a specific individual with a specific, vivid need raises more charitable responsiveness than statistical victims or charitable organizations ( Kogut and Ritov, 2011 ; Ein-Gar and Levontin, 2013 ; Lee and Feeley, 2016 ). This effect, which is driven by the salience of a single person in need, diminishes when donors become aware of others who have a similar need yet are not given help ( Västfjäll et al, 2015 ; Ein-Gar et al, 2021 ).…”

Reconsidering prosocial behavior as intersocial: A literature review and a new perspective

“…This paper highlights the limitations of past research that presented isolated decision choices to consumers where they decided between only one prosocial cause and whether to be prosocial or not—when two choices are presented, considerations of fairness in donating to one cause over the other become salient in minds of consumers and therefore they become less likely to donate to either cause as compared to being presented an isolated request to donate to only one of the two causes. The choices Ein‐Gar et al (2021) presented to participants were of two highly similar victims in need, and they only presented a choice between two victims. Future research could consider what might happen when the choice set is further expanded, when the diversity of people in need increases, when the similarity between the donor and recipient decreases, or when different forms of prosocial action could be engaged in, for instance, giving time versus money versus food versus mentorship versus other resources but across a range of different causes, and potentially even at different time periods.…”

“…Simply picking up on a single tradeoff between two options instead of a single option—the way Ein‐Gar et al (2021) did—can yield important insights that qualify past beliefs regarding when and why people are prosocial. By asking what happens when consumers consider the opportunity cost of doing action A over action B, Ein‐Gar et al (2021) also mapped more realistically the kinds of prosocial behavior requests consumers get and consider. The richer the set of tradeoffs researchers consider, the more likely it is to be intersocial and involve questions about how people might want to relate to others, whom they may wish to relate to, in which capacity they may wish to relate to them, how frequently they may wish to relate, and so forth.…”