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BEHAVIORAL INSIGHTS TO END GLOBAL POVERTY
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Intervention Design
In researching how to increase levels of charitable giving, we found that there are two well-studied challenges on the donor side: (1) donors rarely give as much as they would like, and (2) donors are often unable to articulate consistent, evidence-based approaches to choosing the recipients of their donations.14 From a behavioral perspective, charities must also vie for limited cognitive attention, as potential donors find themselves distracted by flashy advertising campaigns or diverted by events in their own lives. Given this multitude of obstacles, increasing charitable giving can feel like an insurmountable challenge, particularly for under-resourced charities that focus on less flashy, albeit necessary, causes. In this literature review, we present findings from a survey of field-based or “field-like” experiments that utilize behavioral insights within the domain of charities and charity-adjacent organizations. In pursuit of this goal, we will articulate findings from behavioral science literature as they relate to particular behavioral principles, namely: choice architecture, social norms, empathy, overhead cost aversion, and anchoring. These five fundamentals may be particularly important for The Life You Can Save because they are backed by multiple behavioral science studies; we offer more complete evidence for these strategies below. In choosing these five principles,
we thought about the full process of donation, from start to finish. What motivates a potential donor to give to charity (empathy and social norms)? How they can be guided through the donation process via careful website design (anchoring and choice architecture)? And what aspects of charity organizational structure may make donors less inclined to contribute (overhead cost aversion)? The literature review is structured as follows: first, we will briefly discuss the five selected behavioral principles. Then, we will turn our attention to evidence of said behavioral principles. Finally, we will conclude by looking at the behavioral science principles at work on the websites of other charitable organizations of similar caliber and mission to The Life You Can Save.
Description of Selected Behavioral Principles Our literature review focuses on evidence that maps onto five standard behavioral science principles: choice architecture, social norms, empathy, overhead cost aversion, and anchoring. Our process of selection was to provide evidence from field-experiments, as this is more applicable to the work of The Life You Can Save. Our goal is to offer opportunities via these studies to re-think future strategies and assess past work. For completeness, we briefly define these principles below before proceeding to summaries of their evidence.
