Thumbs Down for the Thumbs Up Emoji: Experimental Evidence on the Impact of Instantaneous Positive Reinforcement on Charitable Giving
SSRN Electronic Journal
2022
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Example: if you select the 1-year option for an article published in 2019 and a metric category shows 90%, that means that the article or review is performing better than 90% of the other articles/reviews published in that journal in 2019. If you select the 3-year option for the same article published in 2019 and the metric category shows 90%, that means that the article or review is performing better than 90% of the other articles/reviews published in that journal in 2019, 2018 and 2017.
Citation Benchmarking is provided by Scopus and SciVal and is different from the metrics context provided by PlumX Metrics.
Article Description
Historically, positive reinforcement (PRI) for charitable giving happens after the fact: thank-you letters, calls, or gifts from the charities to donors. With online giving becoming more prevalent, there exists an opportunity for instantaneous PRI. Our study offers the first evidence, to our knowledge, of the effect of instantaneous PRI on giving. We conduct two large-scale online experiments, one on Amazon Mturk and one, as a robustness test, on Prolific. In the primary experiment, participants are randomly assigned to either a baseline with no PRI; a treatment in which subjects receive a static PRI thumbs up emoji (a recognized gesture of approval); a treatment in which subjects receive a dynamic PRI thumbs up emoji (the emoji varies directly in size with the size of the donation); and two other controls. Consistent with much of the findings on after-the-fact positive reinforcement, we find that donation behavior in the instantaneous dynamic PRI treatment does not differ significantly from the baseline. Surprisingly, we find that static PRI results in significantly less being donated. Our second experiment confirms our null result finding that instantaneous PRI does not significantly increase giving. These results suggest that organizations and policymakers should be hesitant to use instantaneous PRI, as it ranges from null to negative effects.
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