Charities often use incentives to increase prosocial action. However, charities sometimes downplay these incentives in their messaging (pilot study), possibly to avoid demotivating donors. We challenge this strategy, examining whether increasing the salience of incentives for prosocial action can in fact motivate charitable behavior. Three controlled experiments (N = 2,203 adults) and a field study with an alumni-donation campaign (N = 22,468 adults) found that more (vs. less) salient incentives are more effective at increasing prosocial behavior when prosocial motivation is low (vs. high). This is because more (vs. less) salient incentives increase relative consideration of self-interest (vs. other-regarding) benefits, which is a stronger driver of behavior at low (vs. high) levels of prosocial motivation. By identifying that prosocial motivation moderates the effect of incentive salience on charitable behavior, and by detailing the underlying mechanism, we advance theory and practice on incentive salience, motivation, and charitable giving.

Donations play a critical role in supporting the provision of public goods, yet how donating behaviour changes in response to health shocks is poorly understood. We investigate how the household\'s joint decision to donate time (volunteer) and money changes following a health shock. Using data from the United States Panel Study of Income Dynamics, and a within-household design that captures the dynamics of a post-health shock response, we find no overall change in the probability of households donating money but an overall reduction in the probability of donating time following a health shock. This is driven by a significant shift from donating both money and time to donating only money after a health shock. The shift away from donating time occurs for both the individual who experienced the health shock and their spouse, though the reduction is greater for the spouse. We examine the role of labour market responses to health shocks in explaining donating behaviour and find that consistent with the added worker effect, spouses of those who experience a health shock increase their work hours, constraining their time available for volunteering.

Why did some individuals react to the Covid-19 crisis in a prosocial manner, whereas others withdrew from society? To shed light onto this question, we investigate changing patterns of charitable giving during the pandemic. The study analyzes survey data of 2000 individuals, representative of the populations of Germany and Austria. Logistic regressions reveal that personal affectedness by Covid-19 seems to play a crucial role: those who were personally affected either mentally, financially, or health-wise during the first 12 months of Covid-19 were most likely to have changed their giving behavior. The observed patterns fit psychological explanations of how human beings process existential threats. Our findings indicate that a profound societal crisis in itself mainly leads to changes in charitable giving if individuals are severely affected on a personal level. Thereby, we contribute to a better understanding of the mechanisms underlying individuals\' charitable giving behavior in times of crisis.
UNASSIGNED: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11266-023-00558-y.

We report the results of an experiment on willful information avoidance regarding measures to address Covid-19. In the experiment, participants choose between two options, each associated with a contribution to the Corona Fund of the Red Cross USA and a payment to the participant. Depending on the treatment, either the participants\' payoff, the donation, both or none of these pieces of information were hidden, but revealable. With this design, we can separate motivated reasons for ignorance from non-motivated reasons, both of which are present in our data. Furthermore, we find evidence of both self-serving and pro-social information avoidance. These behavioral patterns correlate with the subjects\' political attitudes: while voters of the Democratic Party are prone to exhibit pro-social information avoidance, Republican voters rather engage in self-serving information avoidance.

OBJECTIVE: In the current project, we focus on another group of unusual altruists: people who have taken the Giving What We Can (GWWC) pledge to donate at least 10% of their income to charity. Our project aims to understand what is unique about this population.
BACKGROUND: Many people care about helping, but in recent years there has been a surge of research examining those whose moral concern for others goes far beyond that of the typical population. These unusual altruists (also termed extraordinary or extreme altruists or moral exemplars) make great personal sacrifices to help others-such as donating their kidneys to strangers or participating in COVID-19 vaccine challenge trials.
METHODS: In a global study (N = 536) we examine a number of cognitive and personality traits of GWWC pledgers and compare them to a country-matched comparison group.
RESULTS: In accordance with our predictions, GWWC pledgers were better at identifying fearful faces, more morally expansive and higher in actively open-minded thinking, need for cognition and two subscales of utilitarianism and, tentatively, lower in social dominance orientation. Against our predictions, they were lower in maximizing tendency. Finally, we found an inconclusive relationship between pledger status and empathy/compassion that we believe warrants further examination.
CONCLUSIONS: These findings offer initial insights into the characteristics that set apart those who have made the decision to donate a substantial portion of their income to help others.

OBJECTIVE: This preregistered study provides robust estimates of the links between Big Five personality traits and civic engagement across different samples and life stages.
METHODS: We recruited two samples from the United States and United Kingdom (total N = 1593) and measured Big Five domains, Big Five aspects, and six civic engagement indicators: volunteerism, charitable giving, donating blood, posthumous organ donation, political voting, and vaccination. We compared the links between these measures across samples and tested moderation across life stages and several sociodemographic variables. We explored whether these links replicate between self- and peer-reports.
RESULTS: We found small but robust effects. Agreeable, extraverted, and open/intellectual participants reported more civic engagement, especially volunteerism and charitable giving. Neurotic and conscientious participants mainly reported less civic engagement, especially blood and organ donations. One of the two Big Five aspects often drove these links, such as Compassion in the link between Agreeableness and volunteerism. We found some differences between younger and middle-aged adults.
CONCLUSIONS: Big Five personality traits predict civic engagement modestly but consistently, with adequate study power being critical to detecting these links. Lower-order traits, such as Big Five aspects, clarify the relationships between traits and engagement. Life stages and sociodemographic variables have limited effects.

Social information has substantial influences on prosocial behavior. In this study, we performed an event-related potential (ERP) experiment to examine the effect of social influence on giving. The participants were allowed to form an initial decision on how much money to donate to a charity provided the program\'s average donation amount and to make a second donation decision. Social influence varied in different directions (upward, downward and equal) by altering the relative donation amount between the average donation amount and the participants\' first donation amount. The behavioral results showed that participants increased their donation amount in the upward condition and decreased it in the downward condition. The ERP results revealed that upward social information evoked larger feedback-related negativity (FRN) amplitudes and smaller P3 amplitudes than in the downward and equal conditions. Furthermore, the pressure ratings, rather than the happiness ratings, were associated with the FRN patterns across the three conditions. We argue that people in social situations are more likely to increase their donations owing to pressure than voluntary altruism. Our study provides the first ERP evidence that different directions of social information evoke different neural responses in time course processing.

A growing number of people donate to charity together with others, such as a spouse, friend, or stranger. Does giving to charity collectively with another person-called collaborative giving-promote generosity? Existing data offer unsatisfactory insight; most studies are correlational, present mixed findings, or examine other concepts. Yet, theory suggests that collaborative giving may increase generosity because giving with others could be intrinsically enjoyable. We conducted two well-powered, pre-registered experiments to test whether collaborative giving boosts generosity. In Experiment 1 (N = 202; 101 dyads) and Experiment 2 (N = 310; 155 dyads), pairs of unacquainted undergraduates earned money and were randomly assigned to donate collaboratively (Experiments 1-2), individually in each other\'s presence (Experiments 1-2), or privately (Experiment 2). Across studies, we observed no condition differences on generosity. However, collaborative (vs. individual) giving predicted greater intrinsic enjoyment, which, in turn, predicted larger donations, suggesting a promising potential mechanism for future research and practice.

Current studies on the effect of thank-you gifts on charitable giving are primarily based on the conclusion of a milestone paper, \"The counterintuitive effects of thank-you gifts on charitable giving\" which argued that thank-you gifts are mainly driven by lower feelings of altruism. This article argues that the question design in \"The counterintuitive effects of thank-you gifts on charitable giving\" may lead to a biased conclusion. This article added an extra treatment group to the original study and found that the authors neglected the critical impact of participants\' inference about the usage of the money.

Compassion collapse is a phenomenon where feelings and helping behavior decrease as the number of needy increases. But what are the underlying mechanisms for compassion collapse? Previous research has attempted to pit two explanations: Limitations of the feeling system vs. motivated down-regulation of emotion, against each other. In this article, we critically reexamine a previous study comparing these two accounts published in 2011 and present new data that contest motivated down-regulation of emotion as the primary explanation for compassion collapse.