About the speaker

Associate Professor Gigi Foster, The University of New South Wales.

Why do we give to charity? Prior research has pointed to a range of motivations that have been classified by scholars as variously ‘selfish’ or ‘altruistic’, or somewhere in-between (e.g., Andreoni’s ‘warm glow’). Conceptual progress on this issue has been hampered by the absence of a unifying framework within which such potential motives can be nested and potentially horse-raced. At the same time, empirical progress has been hounded by problems of identification, even in custom-designed field experiments and controlled laboratory environments, in part because what one seeks to identify has not always been clear and convincing from a theoretical standpoint.

In this paper, we address these problems by first adapting a very simple, unifying framework developed by Frijters and Foster (2016) that is able to accommodate a wide array of possible reasons for giving. Guided by this framework and prior literature about different possible motivations for giving, we then design and run a laboratory experiment to measure the respective sizes of influence of three distinct core motives: concern for one’s self-image, concern for one’s image in the eyes of others, and concern for the welfare of the charity recipient. Our results, using Australian university students as subjects, show that image concerns far outstrip concerns for the charity recipient’s welfare when the recipient is the student’s own university, and are also substantial when the recipient is a cancer research institute. Our evidence also suggests surprising effects on donation behavior from donation settings in which donors have the choice of whether to have their donation made public or remain anonymous, and that students are overall more loyal to the cause of cancer research than to their own university. Both our conceptual framework and our experimental design can easily be applied to explore other decision-making contexts where people are not entirely driven by the simple objective of wealth maximisation.

Afternoon tea available.

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