A growing literature demonstrates reluctant giving: Many people who voluntarily give to charity no longer do so when they have an excuse not to give. The mechanisms of reluctance, however, remain unclear. Consistent with this literature, we found that injecting attributional ambiguity into a real charitable decision significantly reduces donations. Participants in our studies (N = 2147) faced a binary choice between options for distributing money between themselves and a charity, with one option giving more to a charity and the other leaving more for themselves. Borrowing from a classic attributional ambiguity paradigm, we manipulated whether the charity involved was the same for both options or different, giving participants the possible excuse of keeping more money due to preferring one charity over another. Participants indeed kept more for themselves when there were two different charities, regardless of which charity was associated with the more self-beneficial option, ostensibly revealing a hidden preference for selfishness. Using incentive compatible elications, we found no evidence that participants used the excuse of preferring one charity to another to justify their choices. Instead, we find that attributional ambiguity weakened perceptions that there is a norm against keeping more money in the task, both among decision makers and disinterested third parties. We conclude that attributional ambiguity lowers donations by relieving internalized social pressure to give.

越来越多的文献表明了不情愿的捐赠：许多自愿捐赠给慈善机构的人在有借口不捐赠时不再这样做。然而，不情愿的机制仍不清楚。与该文献一致，我们发现，在真正的慈善决策中注入归因模糊性会显着减少捐赠。我们研究的参与者（N = 2147）面临着在自己和慈善机构之间分配金钱的选择之间的二元选择，一种选择是向慈善机构捐赠更多，另一种选择为自己留下更多。借鉴经典的归因模糊范式，我们操纵了两种选择所涉及的慈善机构是否相同或不同，为参与者提供了可能的借口，因为他们更喜欢一个慈善机构而不是另一个慈善机构，从而保留更多的钱。当存在两个不同的慈善机构时，参与者确实为自己保留了更多，无论哪一个慈善机构与更自利的选择相关联，表面上揭示了对自私的隐藏偏好。通过使用激励相容的奖励，我们没有发现任何证据表明参与者使用更喜欢一个慈善机构而不是另一个慈善机构的借口来证明他们的选择是合理的。反而，我们发现，归因的模糊性削弱了决策者和公正的第三方之间的看法，即存在一种反对在任务中保留更多资金的规范。我们得出的结论是，归因模糊性通过减轻内在的社会捐赠压力来降低捐赠量。