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Thoughts and prayers – Do they crowd out charity donations?

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Abstract

For centuries, scholars have examined what motivates prosocial behavior. In the U.S., prosocial behavior is routinely accompanied by thoughts and prayers. Yet, the impact on prosocial behavior of such gestures is unknown. We examine how thoughts and prayers affect charity donations to victims of a major public risk—natural disasters. Our analytical framework suggests both thoughts and prayers increase empathy for those receiving such gestures, which may positively impact donations. However, we also find that prayers on behalf of others are regarded as helpful to recipients—we identify them as a moral action—which can generate a counter-veiling substitution effect on donations. On net, our framework suggests prayers crowd out donations to natural disaster victims, while thoughts do not. We test these predictions in three incentivized experiments with Red Cross donations to hurricane victims. Consistent with our model, our main experiment finds prayers reduce donations, while thoughts do not. Two follow-up experiments find results are robust to alternative hurricane locations but may be sensitive to other frames—we find no impact of thoughts or prayers on donations when donations are capped at small amounts. Nevertheless, our results provide the novel insight that prayers may have important effects on material aid in the wake of public catastrophes (in two out of three experiments they crowd out donations), which highlights the importance of research on the impact of prayers on prosocial behavior.

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Notes

  1. Although it is unknown how much of praying is conducted on behalf of others, the act of praying is common—the Pew Research Center (2014) finds a majority of Americans pray on a daily basis.

  2. Andreoni (1989, 1990) distinguishes between “pure altruists,” who are altruistic only because they care for others’ well-being, “pure egoists,” who care only for their own well-being and therefore only engage in altruistic behavior if it generates “warm glow” that directly benefits their own utility, and “impure altruists,” who engage in altruism because they care for both the warm glow and others’ well-being. Evidence suggests that donors to public goods are typically “impure altruists,” who receive personal utility (“warm glow”) from the act of giving itself and also genuinely care for the beneficiaries’ well-being (e.g., Crumpler and Grossman 2008; Eckel and Grossman 2003).

  3. Given the two tests are concerned with different null hypotheses, these tests could generate conflicting results—means may be equal over two groups, while the overall distribution is not. However, we encountered no conflicting results over these tests, only marginal differences in p-values.

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  1. Department of Economics, University of Wyoming, 1000 E. University Ave., Laramie, WY, 82071, USA

    Linda Thunström

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The author thanks Ben Gilbert, Stephen Newbold, Shiri Noy, Jason F. Shogren and Klaas van‘t Veld for helpful comments and suggestions. The main experiment in this study has been registered in the American Economic Association Registry for Randomized Controlled Trials (AEARCTR-0002653), while the follow-up experiments, aimed for robustness checks, were not.

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Appendices

Appendix 1: Robustness of results when considering covariates in the analysis

Main experiment

Table 3 Relationship between prayers, thoughts and donations – religious participants, Main experiment
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Follow-up Experiment 1

Table 4 Relationship between prayers and donations – Follow-up Experiment 1
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Follow-up Experiment 2

Table 5 Relationship between prayers and choice to donate – Follow-up Experiment 2
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Appendix 2: Descriptive statistics of samples in Follow-up Experiments

Table 6 Summary statistics – Follow-up Experiment 1
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Table 7 Summary statistics – Follow-up Experiment 2
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Thunström, L. Thoughts and prayers – Do they crowd out charity donations?. J Risk Uncertain 60, 1–28 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11166-020-09322-9

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