Impact Audio Presents: Why don’t more people give?

Episode Notes:

• Read the research on prosocial behavior

• Check out the experiments focused on calculative mindset

• Dig into the study by Matthew Chao on demotivating incentives in charitable giving

• Read about the adverse effect of choice in donation decisions

• Learn more about pseudoinefficacy

• Find out how unfairness can impact charitable donations 

• Dig into the role of identity in charitable giving 

Transcript:

This transcript was automatically generated.

You give people an opportunity to donate versus you give them an opportunity to donate in exchange for a mug or a tote bag. I think what these incentives do and is yeah. They shift you towards a different mindset and an understanding of it. If it's just donate, it becomes it's a simple action.

The way you construe it is I'm donating versus as soon as you introduce the mug, start calculating. Okay. I'm donating, but, really, I I guess this is an exchange to a new I mean, even if it stops there, you've already complicated the process. And people don't, I mean, don't like overcomplicate things.

People like simple decisions.

Remember those ads from the eighties and nineties that tried to convince you to donate to charity by saying that you could change someone's life for the price of a cup of coffee.

For about seventy cents, you can also buy a cup of coffee. In Guatemala for seventy cents a day, you you can help a child like Vilma get the clothes she needs to attend school.

I think there is a usefulness to this framing, like making a donation feel so possible and concrete, but the more that I learn about giving, the more that I think this kind of messaging actually gets in the way of what we're trying to achieve.

Because when you focus on something like a cup of coffee, you draw people's attention to what they have to give up in order to donate. It's a small thing, but now you've created this calculation in people's minds. So instead of thinking about what's gained when they give to charity or a sense of collective good, people start thinking about what they're forfeiting.

And that kind of thinking undercuts someone's deeper motivation to give.

People have all sorts of reasons why they do give to charity, but I spend a lot of my time wrestling with the question of why people don't.

Of course, some people want to give, but they don't have the financial means to do so. But there's this large contingent of people who want to give, and they can, but they often choose not to.

Welcome to Impact Audio. I'm Sam Kaplan, Vice President of Social Impact at Submittable. Today, we're going to do something different. We're going to dig into one big question that's been nagging us: Why don't more people give?

Throughout the episode, we explore why sometimes the tactics we use to convince people to donate backfire in unexpected ways. A social psychologist gets on the mic to school us all on human nature, and we dig into studies that prove that sometimes math is actually bad for us.

Hi, I'm Natalia, Director of Product Marketing at Submittable. Our team spends a lot of time thinking about all the little details that make employee giving programs successful.

That's why we've created the first true integration with Microsoft Teams. One that works both ways. Now, instead of only receiving passive notifications, employees can actually donate with just one click without ever logging in to a new platform.

Think it could be good for your team? Reach out to us at submittable dot com slash teams.

A quick thought experiment. Imagine you're driving. It's rush hour, traffic is backed up, and up ahead of you, someone is trying to turn into your lane.

They look hopeless. No one's letting them in, but you're about to pull up alongside them, and you get to decide whether or not you're gonna break a little early and wave them in. What do you do?

Okay. Now imagine that I tell you that I'll give you five dollars if you let them in.

It might not change your decision, but now, instead of thinking about how it feels to help someone out, you're probably thinking about that five dollars.

That's where I wanna start today. Because as I was doing the research for this episode, I found something that surprised me about how a person's frame of mind can affect their decision to give.

First, let's break down two different mindsets: prosocial and calculative.

A prosocial mindset is when people prioritize the welfare of others or the greater good above their own in some way.

It's that impulse to let someone pull ahead of you in traffic even though it doesn't benefit you.

There's a ton of research out there trying to suss out whether prosocial behavior comes from nature or nurture, and like most conversations in that realm, the answer seems to be both. There's evidence humans can learn prosocial behavior. As kids, when we see our parents or caretakers doing things like helping out neighbors or picking up litter and following laws, we're more likely to do the same.

Prosocial behaviors, when you practice them, can become habitual.

But humans don't have the market cornered when it comes to prosocial behavior.

Studies have shown animals are willing to sacrifice for the greater good too.

In experiments, rats give up rewards in order to free other rats in danger. Velvet monkeys call out to attract predators who are threatening their kin. And in what I think is the most interesting case, humpback whales extend prosocial behavior to other species. They've been observed interfering to defend gray whales, seals, sea lions from killer whales. So there is an argument to be made that prosocial behavior is built into our wiring.

To go a little deeper, I talked to someone who spent over a decade studying how psychological theory applies to real world situations.

I'm David Kaltstein. I have a PhD in social psychology.

David explains what's at the root of prosocial behavior.

What's really unique to humans is even after birth, that gestation period, humans have this really extended period of being dependent on other people. I mean, most other animals are born ready to walk, but human infants pretty, pretty reliant on caregivers. So even from, like, our very earliest experiences in biologically, we sort of have an ingrained orientation towards other people. And really, as you go through life, we're all really dependent on each other, and that requires other people.

The easiest way to think about is all the things we get from other people, like as a baby, what you get from your parents. But, I mean, in order to get those things, you have to give too. If you go through your life being totally selfish, you're not really gonna be able to capitalize on what other people can give you if they're not gonna want it. Reciprocity is a big part of it.

So all this to say, the short version is we're just incredibly interdependent. Humans really depend on each other for progress, for living, for meeting any kind of valued goals.

How we learned this, how we learned to become pro social, I think some of it is we're innately wired towards other people. It's biological. Think it's innate, I also think it's very learned. From the very beginning of our lives, we learn that other people are helping us meet our needs, and sooner or later we learn that we have the ability to help them too.

So essentially, prosocial behavior is the glue that holds communities together, whether it's a workplace or a whole country. But some of our other very human instincts pull us away from our natural impulse to look out for each other.

A calculative mindset is just like it sounds. It's an analytical way of thinking that relies on logic and math to make decisions.

Now, prosocial and calculative mindsets aren't opposite of each other or even mutually exclusive, and there's some interplay between them that's worth understanding.

When When And while you can make the case that by supporting the greater good, there's a chance that we're indirectly improving conditions for ourselves, that calculation feels pretty abstract.

Research shows that a calculative mindset can actually be a hindrance to altruistic behavior.

In one experiment, researchers tried to activate a calculative mindset by asking some participants to do a mathematical task before they played a game. Participants who did the calculative task were more prone to act selfishly and unethically within the games. When given the opportunity, they lied and kept more money for themselves compared to people who did a more creative task.

So the big takeaway for me is not that some people have calculative minds and some people don't. It's that we can all step into that framework when we need to. And when we do step into that way of thinking, we're less likely to listen to the voice in our head that tells us that giving is the right thing to do.

Maybe because the benefits of giving aren't easy to calculate, there's something unquantifiable about that decision to wave someone into your lane, someone that you'll probably never see again.

And if you're in a mind frame that forces you to assign a hard number to that act, you'll probably undervalue it or maybe not value it at all.

So if you're trying to encourage people to give to charity, you want to do what you can to avoid pitching them into a calculative mindset.

My colleague Eric shares a good example of what that looks like.

Hey, I'm Eric, and I help with research and production.

I'm here to share a study we found from Matthew Chow, an economics professor at Williams College. He conducted an experiment to test how potential donors responded to requests for donations.

In the experiment, they sent mailers out to previous donors to ask them to renew. Chow and his research partners split the donors into three randomly assigned groups. The first group received a simple donation request with information about the organization. The second group received that same request, but with an offer for an optional thank you gift, an insulated tumbler, if they donated a hundred and eighty dollars or more.

As for the third group, they got the same donation request, but instead of a thank you gift, they were given a different incentive. If they donated a hundred and eighty dollars or more, the nonprofit would team up with a local food bank to deliver sixty meals to families in need. Sort of like a charitable domino effect. Same as a tumbler, they could opt in if they wanted. It was not mandatory.

So which group returned the most donations?

It might not be the one you think. It turned out to be the first one. The people who got the simple donation request.

And in his explanation, Chao explains that both gift offers, the tumbler and the meals, draw attention away from the intrinsic motivation to give and pull attention toward the extrinsic benefits. In short, it kicks people into this calculative mindset because instead of thinking about how they want to support a nonprofit they care about, these donors are pushed towards considering the ROI of their donation.

This experiment proves something important, because I could see taking a more is better approach if I were leading a giving campaign.

Thank you gifts, extra donation triggers, basically anything that might convince someone to give. It's easy to think that if it's optional, there's no harm in making the offer. But this study shows the risk you run with the throw everything at the wall and see what sticks approach. Here's David.

I think what these incentives do is, yeah, they shift you towards a different mindset and an understanding of it.

If it's just donate, it becomes it's a simple action. The way you construe it is I'm donating versus as soon as you introduce the mug, start calculating. Okay. I'm donating, but, really, I guess this is an exchange to and you I mean, even if it stops there, you've already complicated the process.

And people don't like overcomplicate things. People like simple decisions.

I think sometimes we forget that in asking people to give, we can't just think of it as a yes or no question. We have to consider the context of the question.

One point David made was that Hugh can help create context for them.

I kinda see it as two big lessons of social psychology, and that's one is that the situation is a very powerful determinant of behavior and much more powerful than people typically realize.

And the second one is that the situation is subjective. What you understand the situation to be could be a variety of things. What your representation or what your understanding is depends on things like motivation, past learning experience, what other people are telling you it is. So applied to giving, I think what this has to say is that one way to promote giving or get people to be more pro social is to create situations that lend themselves to pro social behavior.

Another one is it's similar but it's slightly different it's to change the understanding of the situation such that it's one that promotes pro social behavior. So a concrete example of this is there's this really great study done by Lee Ross. The study is they have participants come in and play a game These are game theory games from economics where basically in in the game you always have a choice of you can cooperate with with other people and you can maximize your impact over the long run or you can they call it defect where you can maximize your own personal gain at the expense of other people.

But in this study, what they did is they gave participants a game where they basically got to decide how cooperative they were gonna be with the other participants. In one condition, they told participants that you're playing the Wall Street game, and in the other condition, told participants that you're playing the community game and the outcome here is how much do you give to other participants And they have really remarkable effects that just changing the name of the game, if you call it the community game, people are significantly more cooperative and more generous in what they give to other people than if you call up the Wall Street game.

This is this is a story about what you understand the situation to be. And when you understand that there's one thing that sort of brings to mind a set of behaviors that go along with what that is.

And it makes it much more likely that people are going to act in that way. The thing that's interesting is people don't really it's not something you really notice or aware of. It's not like when you're playing the community game, you're not sitting there thinking like, oh, man. I could be playing the Wall Street game. I could really be making a fortune. You're just sort of doing what the situation provides and guides to you.

It's so important to think about the context you create. One of my colleagues was recently doing market research and talked to someone about a volunteer program at their company.

Hi. I'm Laura. I'm a writer and researcher.

The employee asked to remain anonymous because they still work at this company. I'll let Laura explain.

So I was doing some research about volunteer programs recently when I talked to someone at a company that had made a change a few years ago that threw their whole giving program into a new context.

So a little background first. This company used to have one special day a year where the whole company got the day off. No one had to use PTO. It was pretty unique and it wasn't like a holiday, it was just a random date.

It was really popular with employees. Co workers spent the day hanging out with each other. They did stuff they liked. It was a feel good thing.

But then, the company changed the policy. Instead of a free day off, they told employees now it was a designated volunteer day. So employees can make a choice. They could work or they could spend the day volunteering.

And now I think if it was any other day, employees would probably feel pretty good about that choice. But the way it came down taking away this free day, the company created a sense of loss and mistrust.

People felt like they'd forfeited the freedom that they really valued and they were left with a pretty sour taste in their mouth about the whole volunteer program. And so even though it's been a few years since the shift, the change still really colors how employees at the company approach volunteering today.

And one employee I spoke to who actually likes to volunteer in his own time says he prefers to work on the designated volunteer day. He explained that he doesn't like feeling like the company is patting itself on the back for his volunteer work. And I think that's what struck me the most, that he viewed the company as trying to take credit for something he was doing and not, like, empowering him to do it. And that really disincentivized him. And from the way he talked about it, that sentiment was not unique.

So there's something in the story that gets at another concept that came up a lot in my research, the idea of fairness. Because I don't necessarily think about fairness when I think about employees deciding whether or not to opt into a giving program, but it can actually play a pretty big role.

First, let's go back to that thought experiment of you and your car. This time, imagine you've had a frustrating day. At work, your team was blamed for a mistake someone else made. When you went to lunch, someone butted in front of you and got the last order of your favorite soup.

Now you're sitting in traffic. Do you think you still let somebody pull in front of you?

Research shows that you're less likely to. People experiencing unfairness tend to take it out on innocent third parties.

On the flip side though, someone experiencing positive emotion is more likely to engage in prosocial behavior.

The big lesson here is that decision to donate doesn't happen in a vacuum. Context matters a lot, and you have the power to help shape that context for people.

Imagine you're standing on a beach, and a big wave rolls in and drops a fish right at your feet. And now it's stuck in the sand.

You can see it's alive, but the tide isn't reaching it, and it's going to die if you don't help.

So you bend down, gently pick up the fish, and you hustle it into the water.

As you watch the fish swim away, you feel a little burst of warmth from doing a good deed.

But then you turn back to the beach, and you see two hundred more fish stuck there.

The kick in the gut you feel in that moment, That's pseudoinefficacy.

It's not that you were ineffective, you saved the fish. But now that you see all the other fish, saving that one fish doesn't feel as meaningful as it once did.

Say you have this perceived ineffectiveness. Now you're not feeling that warm glow from saving a fish, you're weighed down by the knowledge that there are so many fish you can't save. Research shows that pseudoinefficacy drives down charitable giving.

I think some of this kind of comes down to people are just more motivated by behaviors that they believe are effective. So there's self efficacy, like, have the ability to do this behavior, and then there's outcome expectancy of this behavior will produce the outcome I want.

And here again, I guess, as I'm thinking about this, another lesson in subjective understanding of the situation of if you define the situation as my outcome is save a fish versus my outcome is to save the oceans, just the expectancy of being able to do a single thing is a lot higher than the expectancy of being able to do the big task.

And again, this is research like one of Albert Bender's famous theories, self efficacy theory. It's a really sort of basic motivational finding that people are more motivated by outcomes that they expect to be able to fulfill than outcomes that they don't. So if the problem presented to you is just huge and unsolvable, it's not motivating. But if the problem presented to you is something small and feasible to change, you get to draw on that outcome expectancy to build on motivation to act.

The reality of charitable giving is that what each of us can contribute is always going to be just a drop in the bucket to some degree. But we shouldn't let that fact stop us from doing the good we can.

For people managing giving programs, understanding pseudoineficiency is essential.

Because pointing to the size of a problem can actually drive down participation.

What you want is to create a really tight lens so people focus on the impact that they can have.

Specifics are powerful.

Consider the difference between these two donation requests. Your donation helps provide meals for the more than ten thousand families facing food insecurity in this country First is, make sure every second grader at Gregory Elementary goes home on Friday afternoons knowing there's plenty of food to get them and their families through the weekend when free breakfast and lunch aren't available.

You want to create an emotionally resonant case without overwhelming people about the scope of the problem.

Essentially, keep them focused on that one fish that they can get back in the water, even if the beach is covered with fish you need help.

David explains one tactic to make the decision around giving a much simpler equation.

Another way to promote giving is this class of interventions that social scientists have come up with called nudges. What nudges are making sort of small tweaks to decisions like framing of the decision or choices that promote a certain kind of outcome. So a paradigmatic example of nudges are on a menu putting the calories associated with each item on the menu, and that helps people make healthier decisions if they wanna be cutting calories or if they care about calories. It's a small simple thing you can do that can nudge they call it nudges because it nudges behavior in a certain direction.

Examples of successful nudges or nudge type interventions are, and I don't know when this happened, sometime in the past five, ten years are when you get asked if you want to round up at the grocery store or at Taco Bell, if after you make your order and they say, do you wanna round up to donate to charity or donate to to scholarships or medical phones or children's hospitals? What's nice about that is it removes a lot of the friction from giving.

In general, the easier you can make something to do for people, the more likely they are to do it. That's a really simple behavioral principle. So if you make it really easy for people to give, they're more likely to do it. And in this one, you make it easy for people to give and they don't have to give very much. It's not a big deal to round up thirty cents, forty cents, eighty cents. But this campaign is really effective, at least according to Taco Bell.

According to Taco Bell, they raised in twenty twenty four alone, they raised fifty million dollars for scholarships just by getting people to round up. So it's nice because it's also I mean, it kinda speaks to the efficiency issue too of you're framing it not as you wanna solve the problems of affordable education. It's like, hey. Do you wanna change your seventeen dollars and twenty cents to eighteen dollars. I'm quite sure I'll do that.

I want to cover one last reason people don't give to charity, and it's an issue of identity.

For some people, asking them to give to charity is asking them to step outside their conception of self.

They might not see themselves as a giver, or at least not in every context.

I won't go down the rabbit hole of self perception and how we build our core identity because that's more of a college course than a podcast.

But one idea I want to touch on is the mirror effect. Essentially, if you sit someone in front of a mirror, their self awareness goes way up. And in charitable giving, self awareness can be powerful.

Identity is a big driver of where and why people donate.

Now, you can't control whether people have a personal connection to specific causes, but you can make space for them to bring their personal experience into their charitable giving. You want to look for opportunities to hold up that proverbial mirror so people can see themselves in the context of a giving program.

I think social identity is one of the most powerful levers for behavior change. Dafna Oiserman out of USC is a researcher who does a lot of research on identity, She She has a theory called Bayh Demi based motivation. I think that's what it's called. But the basic idea of the theory is that people are motivated to act in identity consistent ways. I think we can sort of take as a backdrop that these are identities that people derive positive self esteem from.

In charitable donations, you can help people lean into their identities. Luke Freeman, former executive director of Giving What We Can, explains that they actively encourage members to consider their identity as they make decisions about charitable giving.

There's so many things that bring us and the world a lot of value that we struggle to motivate ourselves to do.

Why we encourage people to not leave it up to chance and to not rely on making the decisions on a whim. We encourage people to, you know, take a moment to stop and think about what their values are, what they want their giving behaviors to be over the long term, and to change your identity in as part of the process and thinking about yourself as someone who gives. You know, one way of doing that is we have things like our giving pledges or you can set up a recurring donation. You can surround yourself with other people who give and give more and and think about that more intentionally.

One really interesting study I saw on this focused on identity priming, which is an effort to remind someone of their social identity before asking them to give.

For instance, for someone who has donated in the past, evoking this identity as a previous giver has a positive effect on their decision to give again. The study also showed that it was really powerful to evoke a sense of community.

When people were forced to think about their belonging to a local or tight knit community, they were more likely to give.

And if you're in charge of giving programs, you can look for ways to do some form of identity priming.

Remind people about their local community or about their past donations. Ask them what causes matter most to them and why.

Do what you can to connect giving opportunities to their unique sense of self.

The The other thing about putting someone in front of a mirror is that they're not just saying themself, they're placing themself in a social context. They're assessing whether their outfit looks right, if their hair needs to be brushed, how they'll fit in, or measure up with others out in the world.

Mirror you provide within a giving program can do this too.

Now I'm not advocating that you make your giving program competitive, but I think it's powerful for people to see their charitable giving in a social context.

Here's David once more.

There's a ton of research showing that norms have a really huge influence on the way people think and the way people behave. I A lot of times we understand this as kind of peer pressure Like, you understand what's normal, you feel pressured to do something, and a lot of times people think about that in a negative way. You get peer pressured into doing things that you maybe might not otherwise do.

But norms also operate in a really positive way a lot of times. For example, if you're in a library, there's norms to not speak loud, and that's a really cooperative norm. People kind of follow that. It's not hard to enter a library and not do that.

You kind of just know that's the expectation there. Similarly, if you're if you're at a bar, it's okay to yell. It's okay to dance. But if you're at a funeral, you probably shouldn't.

And in each of these situations, it's not hard to restrain your behavior to be norm consistent as part of what the situation, how you understand it. It just kind of guides you effortlessly in that direction. So all this is to say is that if you can create norms or create perceptions of norms that promote giving and pro social behavior, that's a really effective way to promote that behavior.

It's easy once norms are in place, but the question I guess is how do you establish norms? Can do it through communications.

I think a lot of people have given in their lives at some point.

So I think it's easy to draw evidence. You can probably if you ask people a simple question of have you ever given? Have you given on more than one occasion? You'll probably find the overwhelming evidence that people have.

And the more you communicate that to people, the more you're establishing a norm and an accurate one. You don't have to lie to make up a norm, but an accurate one that most people have given in their lives. Most people think it's a good thing to give and to help other people.

And the more you make that the norm, the more you kinda create the community world instead of the Wall Street world.

There's the crux of it. Each of us has more power than we think to shape our world. We just have to get out of our own way.

Because the opportunity to be charitable, whether that's in an organized giving campaign or letting someone pull in front of you in traffic, is a chance to remember that you're not alone. You're part of something much bigger, and I think all of us want to feel that.

So let's do what we can to tap into that sense of interconnectedness however we come to this work.

That's all from me today. Thanks for tuning in to Impact Audio, produced by your friends at Submittable. Until next time.