Does Discussing How Much to Share Affect Sharing Behavior and Trust?

Abstract

This paper examines how the discussion of charitable giving affects donations to refugees and trust between school minors. In a lab-in-the-field experiment with 488 school minors from 13 schools, we randomly assign school minors into pairs that discuss and decide how much of a common fund to transfer to refugee minors. The discussion takes place in a digital chat environment. A treatment without discussion serves as a benchmark without social interaction. Before and after, pairs play a trust game that allows us to measure changes in trust due to the donation discussion and decision. We find that discussing charitable giving increases donation amounts by more than 14%. Moreover, school minors that are perceived as refugee-friendly after the discussion benefit from increased trust by their chat-partner. Our results hold relevance for how social information affect donation behavior and how charitable giving serves as a signal of trustworthiness.

Keywords: Communication, trust, text data, collective decisions, donation, generosity

JEL Classification: C93, D70, D83