Partitioned prosociality: Why giving a large donation bit by bit makes people seem more committed to social causes.

Abstract

Donating money to worthy social causes is one of the most impactful and efficient forms of altruism, but skepticism often clouds perceptions of donors' motives for giving. We propose a solution that reduces this skepticism: Instead of giving a single large donation, donors can partition their donations into multiple, smaller ones. Ten preregistered studies with 3,816 participants supported this idea. The positive effect of partitioned giving was robust to the number and size of the partitions and the method of displaying the partitions. Moreover, this effect emerged when the actual effort to give in partitions was held constant and donors precommitted to giving in partitions. The effect arose because the number of donations seems to act as a heuristic, signaling that the donor has more frequent impulses to give and a greater desire to be connected to the social cause. Accordingly, the effect was enhanced when donors gave on nonconsecutive days rather than consecutive days and diminished when they gave their multiple donations on a single day compared with on different days. This effect emerged across both joint and separate evaluations of partitioned versus lump-sum giving, indicating that people think donors who give in partitions should be judged more positively than those who give in one lump sum. Overall, this work shows that how donors structure their donations affects judgments of their motives for giving, thereby providing new insights into how people evaluate prosocial behavior. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).