Giving Compass' Take:

• Deborah Small explains how her research has uncovered surprising results about charitable giving patterns. 

• How can you use this information to reevaluate your own charitable giving? How should head and heart play into the question of giving? 

• Read more research about maximizing charitable giving. 

What causes them to be so subjective rather than concerned with maximizing the value of their donation?

It’s not that they’re not concerned about the impact of their dollars. In fact, we find that if you give participants in a study a choice of donating to one of a number of organizations that all support the same general cause, and you provide them with effectiveness information, they will choose the most effective one. They know a good deal when they see it.

But if you give them a choice set that consists of a variety of causes, and you provide that same information on effectiveness and make it really easy for them to understand that information, those are the cases in which people ignore the effectiveness information. The reason is because they care about it, but not enough to sacrifice their own personal preferences when choosing a cause to support.

What’s next for this research?

I keep observing the effective altruism movement, and it keeps giving me new ideas for research questions. Wharton doctoral student Josh Lewis and I recognized that oftentimes charities present effectiveness information in terms of the cost of a unit of impact. That would be something like the cost of saving a life, the cost of a mosquito net, a pair of shoes, a pair of eyeglasses — you can go on and on. The problem with that is that when people see the cost of a unit, they want to give exactly that amount. If a malaria prevention mosquito net costs $1, donors tend to give $1. If it costs 50 cents, they give 50 cents. As a result, when the cost of the malaria net is cheaper, they’re actually giving less. This is a case in which they could do more good.

Read the full interview with Deborah Small about charitable giving at Knowledge@Wharton.