Once someone has opened the door to a person soliciting a charitable donation, the “social pressure cost” of saying no is $1.40 to $3.80, a clever economic field experiment concludes. Many gifts in that range are essentially payments to avoid social embarrassment, the authors say—and, in fact, social pressure accounts for more than half of all money donated in such circumstances.
In 2008, the researchers fanned out to nearly 7,700 households in towns surrounding Chicago. Sometimes they just knocked on doors and asked for money for one of two charities: a local children’s hospital and an obscure out-of-state group. Other times they first left a flyer on doors notifying residents of the hour, the next day, of the appeal. Still others, the flyer explicitly allowed people to opt out.
When people got advance notice, doors opened 9% less often — and the drop was even steeper when they could opt out: 23%.
With the opt-out option, donations dropped 28% for the local charity, 40% for the out-of-state charity, with most of the lost gifts being under $10.
Many people who give on the doorstep clearly would rather not. “They give, says John List, an economist at the University of Chicago and a co-author of the study, “but if they could do it all over again, if they knew who was at the door, they would stay on the couch.” The resulting unhappiness and inefficiency —a loss of “utility” amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars annually — outweigh the benefits of such campaigns, by some measures. But rather than proposing a ban, the authors suggest making the chance to opt out universal.
The finding, it should be said, applies only to relatively intense face-to-face encounters, not solicitations through the mail or other lower-pressure “asks.”
Source: “Testing for Altruism and Social Pressure in Charitable Giving,” Stefano DellaVigna, John A. List and Ulrike Malmendier, The Quarterly Journal of Economics (forthcoming)