NO PAIN, NO GAIN: THE IMPACT OF SELF SACRIFICE ON CHARITABLE DONATIONS

A podcast with Dr Christopher Olivola from Warwick Business School

The martyrdom effect

The word ‘martyr’ has strong connotations. It is a word that implies self-sacrifice, suffering and a steadfast commitment to a cause. On first glance, it’s not a word one would associate with those who fundraise for charity. As good as bake sales are, time spent producing cupcakes does not make someone a martyr – no matter how much flour they are covered in.

Of course, bake sales are not the only means of philanthropy. It is now reasonably commonplace to hear of friends, family or colleagues undertaking a mud run, three peaks challenge or triathlon for a good cause. The self-sacrifice involved in raising money this way, and people’s subsequent willingness to donate more money compared to less ‘extreme’ methods of fundraising, is what Dr Olivola has dubbed 'the martyrdom effect'. In this podcast he discusses his paper, The martyrdom effect: When pain and effort increase pro-social contributions with Dr Annette Rubery. The paper was written in partnership with Professor Eldar Shafir of Princeton University.

“Basically, the martyrdom effect is when contributions are associated with some kind of effort, pain, suffering or challenge,” explains Dr Olivola. “And people contribute more in that case.”

The concept behind the martyrdom effect is not, in and of itself, new. Charities like Mind and Macmillan have a variety of ‘extreme’ events listed on their websites for fundraisers to participate in.

“Charities have either intuitively or accidentally come across this phenomenon,” explains Dr Olivola. “This research was inspired by the observation that we could see the popularity of these extreme events.”

Testing the principle

Given that pain and suffering are things that humans normally seek to avoid, Dr Olivola began looking for an explanation of the psychological state behind this phenomenon. With a group of test subjects, he and Professor Shafir undertook five experiments designed to develop an understanding of what motivates charitable giving. The first experiment involved proposing hypothetical scenarios to discover the subject’s views on charitable giving.
“People report they would give more if they, or a friend, had to exert effort or endure pain for the same cause,” says Dr Olivola. “We then wanted to see if this would happen with real decisions, real pain and real money at stake.”

A follow up experiment was conducted based on the principles of a public goods game. The game is used in experimental economics to ascertain how people contribute to the public good – either cooperating or defecting and ‘free-riding’ off other players in the game. In the experiment, each participant had a sum of money. They could choose to hold on to the money and keep it or put a percentage of their choosing into a central fund. At the end of the game the fund would be doubled and the money distributed evenly to all players, regardless of how much they had put in.

“The individual has a selfish incentive to keep their money and hope the group all give theirs,” explains Dr Olivola. “This is the best way to make the most possible money – freeriding on other people’s contributions but, on average, people gave around three of the five dollars we’d given them.”

In a subsequent experiment, designed to represent the self-sacrifice and suffering involved in events such as marathon running, the amount would only be doubled if all those who had contributed to the central pot placed their hands in very cold water for 60 seconds. The contestants were made aware of this condition before they made their contributions.

“We essentially gave people an incentive, a good reason not to contribute,” he explains. “We found, surprisingly, that people were giving more money. People were giving four out of five dollars.”

Sacrifice needs creativity

The martyrdom effect does not appear to remain constant, however. Dr Olivola warns that some events, previously considered to involve self-sacrifice, are losing their impact and ability to raise significant funds.

“It’s no longer novel to run 20 miles to raise money,” he explains. “In response to that, people are getting very creative in how they inflict or endure pain to raise money for a cause.”

Dr Olivola believes charities could use this research to benefit themselves and help people to fundraise more effectively. “The evidence suggests that the amount of pain isn’t fundamental,” he explains. “What charities need to understand is that the goal is not to make it as difficult as possible; just challenging enough so that people perceive it as an obstacle to overcome. Our research suggests that as long as people perceive it as a challenge, they and their friends will contribute more – how challenging it is beyond that may or may not matter.”

“There’s a very large opportunity cost to these events – all the time, energy and money going into these is time, energy and money that isn’t going into the cause. This is an issue because, say, running in and of itself isn’t going to cure cancer or deal with hunger.

“What I’d like to see, and maybe this is a bit eccentric, but instead of running you could have people racing to plant trees or build homes to raise money for another cause – so you kill two birds with one stone.”

Dr Olivola believes the broader implications for the research cover a much wider area of self-sacrifice – from positive situations like volunteering for events such as the Olympics through to more negative forms of sacrifice seen in terrorists and suicide bombers. “If we can better understand this human tendency, then there might be a lot of interesting and important human implications,” concludes Dr Olivola.

For more information about Dr Olivola’s research, listen to the podcast above.

Dr Christopher Olivola is a Templeton Fellow at the University of Warwick in the Behavioural Science Group at Warwick Business School (WBS) and was previously a Newton International Fellow at WBS.

He is a member of Psi Chi, the international honour society in psychology and is the joint editor, with Daniel Oppenheimer, Associate Professor of Psychology at Princeton University, of 'The Science of Giving: Experimental Approaches to the Study of Charity'.

Dr Olivola’s research interests lie in the psychology of human decision making and behavioural economics and he is currently working with Nick Chater, Professor of Behavioural Science at WBS, on decision by sampling (DbS).

The work is expanding upon the theory developed by Professor Chater along with Professor Gordon Brown and Professor Neil Stewart at the University of Warwick.