Abstract
Philanthropic giving is a classic example of prosociality. Important for funding charitable and not-for-profit organizations, research on philanthropic giving is particularly relevant as competition for donors has increased in recent years. This chapter investigates the influence of social cues on philanthropic solicitation using one-shot anonymous public goods games. The results of these experiments indicate that an individual’s life history experience with volunteering, coupled with level of trust in the community, provides the strongest solicitation effects. We find that characteristics of the individual being solicited interact with particular social cues of the solicitor. The social cues we use are derived from prominent theories of helping behavior, corroborated with the ethnographic record. We connect evolutionary theory of cooperation and economic anthropology to the literature on charitable giving.
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Acknowledgments
We are grateful to the Dan Montgomery NWEEHB Symposium Fund, The Arts and Humanities Institute’s Translating Sustainability Research Cluster, and Bone and Joint Solutions, LLC (Boise, Idaho) for funding this research. We thank the members of John Ziker’s Cooperation and Networks Lab—Haley Myers, Denell Letourneu, and Lisa Greer, and volunteers Hailey Moon and Ed Deckys—for their help during the experimental design and implementation. We thank Faith Brigham for her assistance with logistics and money handling, Kristin Snopkowski for her assistance with statistical analysis, and Kathryn Demps, Kendell House, and Kristin Snopkowski for providing feedback on earlier drafts of this chapter. We also thank Meng Li and an anonymous reviewer for substantive comments.
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Scaggs, S.A., Fulk, K.S., Glass, D., Ziker, J.P. (2017). Framing Charitable Solicitations in a Behavioral Experiment: Cues Derived from Evolutionary Theory of Cooperation and Economic Anthropology. In: Li, M., Tracer, D. (eds) Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Fairness, Equity, and Justice. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58993-0_10
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