OB Research Seminar - Konstantinos Armaos, HEC

Donations by individuals are a crucial source of funding for charity foundations. Past research has focused on identifying the characteristics that increase the perceived trustworthiness of foundations, thus making them more likely to receive donations. This focus on the foundations’ characteristics has led to researchers trusting self-reported measures as the criterion for judging whether people trust charities. However, recent research in the field of motivated cognition has revealed that such self-reported measures should be taken with a grain of salt. For example, in a recent series of experiments (Exley, 2016; 2020), individuals became overly skeptical when they were asked to donate to charities that entailed mediocre evaluations or minor risks, but only when they were asked to donate themselves. On the contrary, when they had to make decisions for others’ donations, they reacted “rationally”. Such results point to a specific type of self-serving cognitive bias that has been termed motivated errors (Exley & Kessler, 2019). In this vein, I will present an experimental design for an online study that we intend to run soon. In this design, we manipulate the charity’s recognizability as well as the levels of efforts required to donate, and we measure their effects on participants’ trust in the researchers’ honesty. The goal is to investigate whether participants use this question about their trust as a convenient, but logically irrelevant, excuse to justify reduced donations. 

References 

Exley, C. L. (2016). Excusing selfishness in charitable giving: The role of risk. The Review of Economic Studies, 83(2), 587-628.  

Exley, C. L. (2020). Using charity performance metrics as an excuse not to give. Management Science, 66(2), 553-563. 

Exley, C. L., & Kessler, J. B. (2019). Motivated errors (No. w26595). National Bureau of Economic Research.