title: Unit asking: a method to boost donations and beyond.
abstract: The solicitation of charitable donations costs billions of dollars annually. Here, we introduce a virtually costless method for boosting charitable donations to a group of needy persons: merely asking donors to indicate a hypothetical amount for helping one of the needy persons before asking donors to decide how much to donate for all of the needy persons. We demonstrated, in both real fund-raisers and scenario-based research, that this simple unit-asking method greatly increases donations for the group of needy persons. Different from phenomena such as the foot-in-the-door and identifiable-victim effects, the unit-asking effect arises because donors are initially scope insensitive and subsequently scope consistent. The method applies to both traditional paper-based fund-raisers and increasingly popular Web-based fund-raisers and has implications for domains other than fund-raisers, such as auctions and budget proposals. Our research suggests that a subtle manipulation based on psychological science can generate a substantial effect in real life.
authors.affiliation: 1Booth School of Business, University of Chicago.
authors.forename: Christopher K
authors.initials: CK
authors.lastname: Hsee
authors.forename: Jiao
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.forename: Zoe Y
authors.initials: ZY
authors.lastname: Lu
authors.forename: Fei
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Xu
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D002608:Charities / Q000191:economics*; D002681:China; D003657:Decision Making / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D005653:Fund Raising / Q000191:economics* / Q000379:methods* / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D037921:Gift Giving; D006379:Helping Behavior; D006801:Humans; D020407:Internet; D007600:Judgment / Q000502:physiology; D008297:Male; D014481:United States
keywords: decision making; judgment