Be Careful When Using Peer-Influence on Nudging Solicitation: Evidence of Potential Negative Effect from a Sample of Chinese University Students

PURPOSE

Peer information is now commonly used in solicitation. However, scholars have long focused on testing its effectiveness on increasing the donation amount without paying attention to its potential negative effects on donors. Thus, the current study employs high vs low peer donation amount (HPDA vs LPDA) information to explore its effect on "how-much-to-donate" decisions and the corresponding neural and psychological reactions at the same time.

PARTICIPANTS AND METHODS

Student samples from a Chinese university and behavioral experiments with the event-related potential (ERP) method were used in this study.

RESULTS

The behavioral results are consistent with previous research in which HPDA was positively associated with higher donation levels. ERP results show the mechanisms behind decision-making can be summarized into a cognitive approach represented by cost-benefit analysis and an affective approach represented by reward perception. More surprisingly, in contrast to the behavioral results, LPDA elicits higher level of reward perception than HPDA.

CONCLUSION

The results indicate that although HPDA leads to higher levels of donation, donors do not show higher levels of reward anticipation at the neurological level, indicating the increment of donation may come at the cost of donors. Theoretical and practical implications are also discussed.

The Neural and Psychological Processes of Peer-Influenced Online Donation Decision: An Event-Related Potential Study

With the rapid development of information and communication technology (ICT), social media-based donation platforms emerged.¹ These platforms innovatively demonstrate peer information (e.g., number of donated peers) on the donation page, which inevitably brings the peer influence into donors’ donation decision process. However, how the peer influence will affect the psychological process of donation decisions are remained unknown. This study used the number of donated peers to examine the effects of peer influence on donors’ donation decisions and extracted event-related potential (ERP) from electroencephalographic data to explore the underlying psychological process. The behavioral results indicated that the number of donated peers positively influenced donors’ willingness to donate. The ERP results suggested that a larger number of donated peers might indicate a higher level of conformity and greater perceived emotional rewards, as a larger P2 amplitude was observed. Following the early processing of emotional stimuli, cognitive detection of decisional risk took place, and the donors reckoned a smaller number of donated peers as a high potential risk, which was reflected by a larger N2 amplitude. In the later stage, the larger number of donated peers, which represented a higher magnitude of prospective emotional rewards, led to a higher incentive to donate, and reflected in a larger amplitude of P3. Additionally, implications and future directions were discussed.

Quantifying the Endogeneity in Online Donations

Charitable crowdfunding provides a new channel for people and families suffering from unforeseen events, such as accidents, severe illness, and so on, to seek help from the public. Thus, finding the key determinants which drive the fundraising process of crowdfunding campaigns is of great importance, especially for those suffering. With a unique data set containing 210,907 crowdfunding projects covering a period from October 2015 to June 2020, from a famous charitable crowdfunding platform, specifically Qingsong Chou, we will reveal how many online donations are due to endogeneity, referring to the positive feedback process of attracting more people to donate through broadcasting campaigns in social networks by donors. For this aim, we calibrate three different Hawkes processes to the event data of online donations for each crowdfunding campaign on each day, which allows us to estimate the branching ratio, a measure of endogeneity. It is found that the online fundraising process works in a sub-critical state and nearly 70-90% of the online donations are endogenous. Furthermore, even though the fundraising amount, number of donations, and number of donors decrease rapidly after the crowdfunding project is created, the measure of endogeneity remains stable during the entire lifetime of crowdfunding projects. Our results not only deepen our understanding of online fundraising dynamics but also provide a quantitative framework to disentangle the endogenous and exogenous dynamics in complex systems.