Certain segments of the population reply on charitable or other non-governmental organizations as their main source of support, with these organizations largely funded by those in society who can afford to give. The present study investigated to what extent information transparency influences donation decisions, and whether specific preferences for charities influences information seeking behavior. We recruited 114 participants via Prolific and employed a binary online Dictator Game to address these two study objectives. The results showed that participants\' actual donation behavior was not influenced by their charity preference or the level of information transparency. However, they were more prone to seek out additional information when deciding about the most preferred category of charity. These results raise important questions as to whether the perceived anonymity of online choices may differ from choices carried out in person.

Previous research suggests that receiving a charity donation could induce gratitude but threaten self-esteem. We investigated if peer charity donations from typical children benefit or harm the mental health of their left-behind children (LBC) classmates. We recruited children at a school (i.e., intervened school) that organized peer charity donations every semester and three typical schools (i.e., non-intervened school) without such intervention in China. Participants completed the gratitude, self-esteem, depression, and social anxiety scales. A statistical toolbox, \"Matchit\", randomly selected 420 children aged 9-13 (220 females, 200 males, 213 LBC, 207 non-LBC); there was no significant difference in left-behind status, age, gender, or family economic status (all p > .10) between the intervened and non-intervened groups (210 per group). Structural equation model analyses revealed that gratitude was associated with higher self-esteem, lower social anxiety, and lower depression. Moreover, the intervention effect on self-esteem was significantly positive among the LBC recipients and non-LBC donors. The interaction between intervention and left-behind status was significant on gratitude and depression. Specifically, the intervention effect was not significant on gratitude or depression among the LBC but was significantly negative on gratitude and depression among the non-LBC. Peer charity donation may increase self-esteem among children (recipients or donors) via increased social connection or satisfaction of basic needs, yet decreased gratitude among the donors due to the \"moral licensing effect\".

Drawing upon the functional characteristics of blockchain technology, this article envisages the feasibility and reliability of developing a charity donation service system loaded onto blockchain in response to the complex service demands encountered by charity operators due to the Covid-19 epidemic. With blockchain technology\'s support as the underlying data book, this article focuses on the practical issues of charity donation fund and material allocation, as well as information release and sharing, charity donation organization, and organization self-management. The paper thereby discusses the key technologies in terms of overall structure design, specific service sector, and functional design of the donation service system and further summarizes the operational mechanism of the system as combined with the needs of help-seeking, receiving, and management users. It is argued that all the above proposals have the potential to alleviate the trust crisis of charity services in China in view of low transparency. The paper expects to provide a useful reference for charity business innovation propelled by blockchain technology.

Monitoring cues, such as an image of a face or pair of eyes, have been found to increase prosocial behaviour in several studies. However, other studies have found little or no support for this effect. Here, we examined whether monitoring cues affect online donations to charity while manipulating the emotion displayed, the number of watchers and the cue type. We also include as statistical controls a range of likely covariates of prosocial behaviour. Using the crowdsourcing Internet marketplace, Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk), 1535 participants completed our survey and were given the opportunity to donate to charity while being shown an image prime. None of the monitoring primes we tested had a significant effect on charitable giving. By contrast, the control variables of culture, age, sex and previous charity giving frequency did predict donations. This work supports the importance of cultural differences and enduring individual differences in prosocial behaviour and shows that a range of artificial monitoring cues do not reliably boost online charity donation on MTurk.