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. 2022 Mar 18:13:800528.
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.800528. eCollection 2022.

Set Size and Donation Behavior

Affiliations

Set Size and Donation Behavior

Amanda M Lindkvist et al. Front Psychol. .

Abstract

Choice overload is the phenomenon that increasing the number of options in an assortment makes choosing between options more difficult, sometimes leading to avoidance of making a choice. In this pre-registered online experiment (N = 501), choice overload was tested in a charitable behavior context, where participants faced a monetary donation choice. Charity organization assortment size was varied between groups, ranging between 2 and 80 options. The results indicate that there were no meaningful differences in donation likelihood between the 16 organization assortment sizes, neither for individuals with high preference certainty nor for individuals with uncertain preferences among charitable causes. Having more charitable organizations to choose from did not affect donation behavior.

Keywords: charitable giving; choice architecture; choice overload; deferral; donation behavior.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Proportion and frequency who donated respectively kept the bonus, for each set size condition. Number of participants who made each donation choice is depicted in white font.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Predicted probability of donating by organization set size. Individual points are colored by preference certainty score, with higher scores depicted as lighter points. Points illustrate predicted values for each participant based on the fitted model.

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