What Factors Determine Who Will Donate to Charity?

Researchers Lindskold, Forte, Haake, and Schmidt (1977) wanted to determine whether the gender and method of request of a solicitor (face-to-face versus an impersonal approach) would influence the monetary donations given to charity by college students. The researchers hypothesized that a more direct approach would be more successful than the impersonal request. They also predicted that the active solicitor would be more successful in an environment without a lot of people than in a crowded one, because the potential donor would have less of a chance to escape by blending in with the crowd. Last, it was predicted that females would be more successful than males at getting donations, due to their perceived level of trustworthiness.
College students as pedestrians on the street corner in Ohio were recruited as subjects for this study. The independent variables were the genders of the solicitors, their method of requesting donations, and the environment (crowded or not). The dependent variables were the number of people who donated and the amount of donations received.
The basic procedure of this experiment was that three male college students and three female college students worked one a time as solicitors for donations for Athens County Society for Crippled Children and Adults. Each student worked in 15 minute intervals in the following conditions: densely populated and direct approach, densely populated and impersonal approach, and sparsely populated and direct approach.
For the direct approach, the solicitor targeted a specific student by making eye contact and directly asking for a donation. For the impersonal approach, the solicitor did not make eye contact, and while not targeting anyone in particular, requested that people give to the children.
As the researchers predicted, the results of the study showed that the direct appeal in fact was more successful than an impersonal appeal, especially in a sparsely populated environment. The researchers speculated that when in a less-crowded area, the donor feels more pressure to give because they are put on the spot.
While Lindskold, Forte, Haake, and Schmidt examined how the type of appeal would influence donations, Wiesenthal, Angstrom and Silverman (1983) examined how group size would influence the amount of donations.The purpose of their experiment was to determine if people are more inclined to be socially responsible when alone or in a group. More specifically, are people in groups less likely to make a charitable donation than one individual, and if so, would they make smaller donations? It was hypothesized that the single individuals would be more willing to contribute to charity than the groups.
The participants in this experiment were undergraduate college students at a pub located on campus. The independent variables were whether the patrons of the pub were alone or in a group, and the size of the group. The dependent variables were the size of the contributions, and whether or not the participants contributed at all.
To obtain the data, undergraduate experimenters volunteered to go to the pub and approach people who were either alone or in a group and request a donation for The Guatamalan Relief Fund. The experiments provided participants with a receipt, which gave them an opportunity to record pertinent information.
It was found that as the size of the group increased, the amount of donations actually decreased. A person who was there alone gave the largest donation, and the biggest group gave nothing at all. The original hypothesis was supported.
In the next experiment by Wiesenthal, Austom, and Silverman (1983), the purpose was to find out if number of students in a classroom would impact the amount of donations received. It was hypothesized that the more students in a class, the smaller the amount of donations would be given per student, and that classrooms with less students would donate more.
A field study of students in 20 classrooms of various sizes were the participants for this study. The Independent Variable was the amount of people in the classroom, and the number of collection tins that went around the room. The dependent variable was the size of the donations.
The collection began right before the actual class started. One male and one female experimenter went into each class. After an introduction by the instructor, the female explained why the donations were being collected and passed around one collection tin for every 15 students.
The hypothesis was supported in this experiment as well. The effect of modeling offers a plausible explanation for the lack of contributions from the larger groups and larger classrooms. We look at other peoples’ behavior to see what is acceptable in an unfamiliar situation. Because one or several group members did not make a donation, the other group members felt it was okay to follow suit and fail to contribute as well.
Cialdini and Schroeder (1976) examined whether requesting lower donation amounts would influence the amount of donations to charity. They wanted to determine whether adding the phrase “even a penny will help