Attributional ambiguity reduces charitable giving by relaxing social norms

Abstract

A growing literature demonstrates reluctant giving: Many people who voluntarily give to charity no longer do so when they have an excuse not to give. The mechanisms of reluctance, however, remain unclear. Consistent with this literature, we found that injecting attributional ambiguity into a real charitable decision significantly reduces donations. Participants in our studies (N = 2147) faced a binary choice between options for distributing money between themselves and a charity, with one option giving more to a charity and the other leaving more for themselves. Borrowing from a classic attributional ambiguity paradigm, we manipulated whether the charity involved was the same for both options or different, giving participants the possible excuse of keeping more money due to preferring one charity over another. Participants indeed kept more for themselves when there were two different charities, regardless of which charity was associated with the more self-beneficial option, ostensibly revealing a hidden preference for selfishness. Using incentive compatible elications, we found no evidence that participants used the excuse of preferring one charity to another to justify their choices. Instead, we find that attributional ambiguity weakened perceptions that there is a norm against keeping more money in the task, both among decision makers and disinterested third parties. We conclude that attributional ambiguity lowers donations by relieving internalized social pressure to give.