Abstract
The content for the book, The Science of Giving: Experimental Approaches to the Study of Charity, was drawn from the 2007 Princeton-Hewlett conference on experimental approaches to the study of charitable giving—just before the start of the global recession of 2008. However, given the economic doldrums we currently face, the results published in this book are perhaps even more important to the field of charitable giving and fund-raising now than they were during the earlier days of strong economic winds and all-time high giving levels.
The book is a collection of research articles contributed by a broad-based assembly of academics from areas such as psychology, business, economics, neuroscience, education, management, social and decision science, finance, and philanthropy. They are represented by high-ranking universities such as Harvard, Maryland, Princeton, University of Colorado, Duke, and the University of Pennsylvania. Few contributors are currently members of ARNOVA. This helps to demonstrate that the study of charitable giving is no longer a narrow field, but has extended broadly to include a mainstream research community. For this reason, the book represents a transition point for this field of study.
Following an introduction, there are four sections that make up the structure of the book: (1) The Value of Giving (2) The Impact of Social Factors (3) The Role of Emotions (4) Other Important Influences on Charitable Giving. Each section consists of specific research that helps the reader understand donation-giving behavior using experimental methodology.
As an example of the type of research reported in the Value of Giving section, Lalin Anik, Lara Aknin, Michael Norton, and Elizabeth Dunn discuss their findings giving empirical evidence that charitable giving actually causes people to become happier. The authors develop a sophisticated graphical model that compares giving behavior and receiving behavior. The slope of the giving behavior curve was determined using questionnaires to gauge participant willingness to donate specified amounts to their favorite charity over receiving that amount in cash. For example 22.1% of the respondents would prefer to give away US$1.00 to their charity instead of receiving it in cash for themselves. One of the implications for fund-raisers, suggested by the authors, is that asking the donor to make several lower level gifts would make the person feel happier than one larger gift of the same total amount.
Rachel Croson and Jen (Yue) Shang’s research on social influences in giving to public radio helps to illustrate the research in the Impact of Social Factors section. They used actual donors to public radio during a fund-raising campaign and experimentally varied the amounts in the following sentence: “We had another donor who gave $X dollars. How much would you like to give today?” (p. 67). In this way they discovered that donors would give more if they were told that someone else had also given a higher level gift. The control group of donors gave an average gift of US$86.58 while the group told that someone had given US$300 had average giving of US$107.23. They found that the level of social information should be in the 90th to 95th percentile of the contribution distribution—“high enough to induce increased giving but not so high as to scare off low donors” (p. 71).
The Role of Emotions section includes research from Michaela Huber, Leaf Van Boven, and Peter McGraw that demonstrates that people make impulsive donation decisions in “less principled ways than they would normally prefer” (p. xvii). They asked people to decide between two crises to help with their donations. They found that the second crisis was selected by more people consistently—even if the first crisis had more deaths associated. The only difference seemed to be the fact that the participants had most recently heard about the second situation and had lost the connection to the first crisis. The emotional pull provided by the last scenario overcame the more logical part of decision-making. They further tested a delay in decision-making, by asking the participants the next day which crises to fund. The emotional effect was reduced and their funding was balanced between the crises.
Finally, Cynthia Cryder and George Loewenstein discuss their research in the final section of the book: Other Important Influences on Charitable Giving. They tested the goal proximity effect (the theory that people want to give more when the organization starts to reach the fund-raising goal) by looking at data from Kiva, a “nonprofit organization that facilitates brokerage of low-interest loans to low-income individuals in the developing world” (p. 243). They collected data about the progress each recipient had achieved every hour, every day, for approximately 1 week. The rate of contributions from donors with only 0% to 33% raised toward the goal was less than for 33% to 66%. And that was less than the rate from donors for projects with 66% to 100% raised.
I’ve read and reviewed numerous books on giving and fund-raising over many years of teaching and practicing fund-raising and there is no other text that provides such a rich combination of articles on experimental research on giving behavior—this book is groundbreaking. This collection saves us, as readers and scholars, the effort of gathering the research separately from various sources. Although it is more of a “reader” than a completed textbook, the book would make an excellent textbook supplement for an advanced graduate course on giving and fund-raising because it offers research-based insight into human behavior and could inspire students to participate in empirical charitable giving research at some level in the future.
My only real concerns with the book fall into two categories. First, given the nature of academic research, the book may not be as applicable to the direct practice of fund-raising. Some of the results may be obvious to a seasoned development professional; for example, getting a prospect to pledge for a future gift may be more successful than asking for the full amount due immediately. Still, it is reassuring that the research results are in line with practice. Second, most academics treat all giving as giving to charities that serve basic human needs (e.g., hunger, shelter, health). In reality, charities may represent opera companies, educational institutions, churches, and more. Most of the research has respondents considering decisions regarding basic human needs—how many starving children can be saved through a gift to organization A versus organization B? A broader understanding of the philanthropic sector by the authors of each study would be helpful in promoting the research results as applicable across the entire sector. However, given the overall strength of the material presented in the book, these two concerns are relatively minor.
As book review editor for NVSQ over the past couple of years, I have read and examined many books as they came across my desk. I finally found a book that I could not pass along to another reviewer—I could not put this book down—and decided to write the review myself. I encourage students, researchers, donors, and fund-raising practitioners to get a copy and enjoy the new and creative research presented in a way that is certainly accessible and useful to a broad audience.