Julian Zlatev and Christine Exley
(Image by John Ritter)

Both Associate Professor Christine Exley and Assistant Professor Julian Zlatev apply the tools of their research to examine a simple question: What makes people give? Exley became interested in the topic as a child, when she tried to raise funds for her local animal shelter—and found it surprisingly difficult. Much later, in the second year of her PhD program, she discovered the field of behavioral economics and folded her non-academic interests into her research. For his part, Zlatev arrived at his PhD in business administration via a degree in psychology, which informed his interest in the motivations around good deeds. Given their respective backgrounds in economics and social psychology, Exley and Zlatev each draw on different literature in their work, and their study designs tend to look quite different, but together they are helping to create a more comprehensive picture of our capacity for generosity. In the following conversation, they share insights into the research on why we respond the way we do, when asked.

You’ve both studied some of the reasons people don’t give and found that human traits like selfishness and avoidance play a part in how much good people do in the world. Having looked under the hood, what’s your outlook on our capacity for giving, broadly speaking?

Christine Exley: There’s a lot of heterogeneity. Some people are extraordinarily generous, and perhaps some folks fall on the other side of the spectrum, and then everyone else is in between. Certainly, we’d like to try to shift the distribution of generosity toward the generous side. To do so, I often ask: How do people develop excuses not to give? Then I try to explore ways to mitigate those excuses. This line of questioning can lead to a darker view of how generous people really are. But people are not always looking for excuses not to give. For instance, people often give because of the warm-glow feeling, which makes them feel good. While one could argue that the warm glow is a “selfish” reason to give, I think it’s actually still a win for humanity.

Julian Zlatev: There’s been a long debate in psychology about whether people are truly altruistic: Is altruism really altruism if it reflects this warm glow or the self-interested reasons Christine is talking about? In some ways, that’s a philosophical debate that can’t really be answered empirically. But it is important to at least ask the question: Does it even matter, if the outcome is that people are being helped?

Another way to look at the variety of good and bad behaviors we see out there is to remember that people can express their prosociality in different ways. Some people might be more willing to give at a grocery store when they ask you to donate at the checkout counter. Other people might not give there but instead respond to a letter or email request. I think, rather than asking what type of person is going to give, the more helpful question is to ask what can be done to change the structure of the ask in any particular situation.

Exley: And if you look at how frequently we’re asked to give—by email, at the grocery store, by postcards, from community organizations—we can’t always say yes. So the fact that people are looking for excuses not to give doesn’t necessarily mean they’re looking for excuses not to give, ever. They may be looking for excuses not to always say “yes,” but rather to say “no” sometimes.

Zlatev: Researchers at Yale have coined phrases that I find helpful in making a distinction between giving and giving in. Giving is about your own internal motivations behind acting prosocially; giving in is acting prosocially but only because you feel obligated. There are tactics that you can use to increase giving in, in the short-term, but it’s always important to consider the effects of this short-term success on people’s feelings toward that charity, in the long-term.

Exley: The time effects are interesting. There’s a fun paper that shows people are much more likely to give to a charity if that charity promises to never ask them again. This reinforces what Julian was saying: While some strategies might make short-run donations go up, they also could clearly dampen giving in the long run.

That strategy works on me when my public radio station uses it. What else do we know about how to positively influence people’s charitable behaviors?

Zlatev: The role of self-interest in prosocial behaviors is a really interesting one, and there are some discrepant findings around how people respond to what you might think of as dual-motive behaviors, which have some benefit to others but also some benefit to the self. Public radio is a good example, where you receive a tote bag in exchange for a pledge to the station. There was quite a bit of research on this, but it was inconsistent about whether it helps or harms donations. So my coauthor, Dale Miller, and I looked at whether different framings of that situation can impact people’s willingness to give.

There are two ways to frame a situation like that: Either you are buying an item with the proceeds going to charity, or you are making a donation and receiving an item in return. We found that the former ends up being a stronger motivator than the latter, because people compare those framings to different sets of behaviors: When you think about buying an item with the proceeds going to charity, you’re comparing that to other times you’ve made a purchase—and the fact that money is going to charity makes it seem like a better version of an economic transaction. Whereas, when you receive an item in return for your donation, your comparison point is other donations you’ve made—and the fact that you’re getting something for this supposedly altruistic act makes it seem like a worse version of a charitable act. So the difference in framing can affect both whether people want to engage in that behavior in the first place and how much they give as a result.

Exley: Another way to increase giving is to surprise someone with a donation ask. In some of my own work, I see that such surprise asks make people more inclined to say yes. One of the interpretations for that result is that, if I have time to think about it, I have more time to come up with excuses to say no. But if I’m surprised in the moment, I might feel a bit more compelled to say yes.

What are the other open research questions that could help us better understand the dynamics around giving?

Exley: One of the big questions in the literature that is not well answered, because it’s really hard to answer, is this: If I encourage people to give more to charity A, how much does it discourage them from giving to charity B? How much am I just moving this money around, as opposed to increasing the pie?

Zlatev: We briefly talked about this earlier, but another important open question is how some of these short-term nudges or interventions affect outcomes beyond the immediate ask. For example, when people feel tricked into giving, does that make them less likely to donate to that charity in the future? Both this and Christine’s question are really about better understanding the larger social impact of some of these specific tactics used to increase giving.

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