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Exp Econ (2012) 15:530546
DOI 10.1007/s10683-011-9312-6
Received: 3 November 2010 / Accepted: 30 November 2011 / Published online: 21 December 2011 Economic Science Association 2011
Abstract The presence of implicit observation cues, such as picture of eyes, has been shown to increase generosity in dictator games, and cooperative behavior in eld settings. I combine these approaches, by testing if a picture of watching eyes affects unconditional giving in a natural environment, where the recipient is a charity organization. Taken together, this study reduces the inuence of three potential confounding factors in previous experiments: (i) experimenter demand effects, (ii) that the facial cue reminds subjects of a human counterpart, and (iii) a social multiplier effect. Specically, the paper reports results from an experiment, conducted in a Swedish supermarket chain, where customers face a naturally occurring decision problem. People who recycle cans and bottles have to choose whether to keep the recycled amount or donate it to a charity organization. By posting a picture of human eyes on recycling machines, I am able to test whether this causes an increase in donations to the charity. Based on a sample covering a 12-day period, 38 stores and 16775 individual choices, I nd no general effect. However, when controlling for store and day xed effects, and using a proxy for store attendance, the picture of eyes increased donated amount by 30 percent during days when relatively few other people visited the store. This result gives further support to the conclusion that subtle social cues can invoke reputation concerns in humans, although the relatively small effect suggests that previous estimates could be biased upward, or at least that the inuence of observational cues is context dependent.
Keywords Altruism Cues Reputation Field Experiment
JEL Classication A13 C93 D03 D64
M. Ekstrm ( )
Department of Economics, Stockholm University, 10691 Stockholm, Sweden e-mail: [email protected]
Do watching eyes affect charitable giving?
Evidence from a eld experiment
Mathias Ekstrm
Do watching eyes affect charitable giving? 531
1 Introduction
Human behavior may be inuenced by the physical presence of others. For example, a workers productivity is affected by being observed by colleagues or not (Bandiera et al. 2005; Mas and Moretti 2009). Likewise, peoples willingness to pay for a public good increases when contributions are...