Maybe favors: How to get more good deeds done.

Abstract

While previous research has revealed several reasons why humans generally do good deeds, we explore a simple nudge that might get more of them done: the "maybe favor." We first show conceptually that, compared to a conventional favor, humans are more willing to grant a favor to a stranger on which they might eventually not have to make good. Furthermore, we conducted a series of fully incentivized experiments (total N = 3,475) where participants could make actual donations to charity. Introducing a "maybe" into our donation proposals by randomly revoking some donations not only led to significant increases in donation rates but also increased the total amount of donations. That is, due to biased perceptions of costs and benefits combined with nonlinear probability weighting, the donations we revoked due to the "maybe" were overcompensated by an increased overall willingness-to-donate. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).