Set Size and Donation Behavior

Amanda M Lindkvist; Timothy J Luke

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2022.800528

Set Size and Donation Behavior

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

Authors

Amanda M Lindkvist^{1

2}, Timothy J Luke¹

Affiliations

¹ Department of Psychology, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden.
² JEDI Lab, Division of Economics, Department of Management and Engineering, Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden.

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.