Pivotal or popular: The effects of social information and feeling pivotal on civic actions

Laura Gee (), Anoushka Kiyawat, Jonathan Meer and Michael J. Schreck

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2024, vol. 219, issue C, 404-413

Abstract: We examine the combined effects of popularity and feelings of being important to reaching a goal by testing how people react to (1) situations in which their own behavior is pivotal or not, as well as (2) the popularity of the action. We conduct a laboratory experiment to cleanly fix beliefs about the person's likelihood of being pivotal in reaching a donation threshold that triggers a matching gift, varying both the pivotality and the number of other donors (popularity). The results are striking in that a person whose action is pivotal is more than twice as likely to make a donation, an increase of approximately 30 percentage points. Popularity, in contrast, is not influential. To test these findings in a more natural setting, we conduct two field experiments, neither of which demonstrates meaningful effects. Our results suggest that pivotality is a more important determinant of prosocial behavior, but that it can be a challenge to leverage this finding to meaningfully improve outcomes in the field.

Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167268123004468
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Pivotal or Popular: The Effects of Social Information and Feeling Pivotal on Civic Actions (2023)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jeborg:v:219:y:2024:i:c:p:404-413

DOI: 10.1016/j.jebo.2023.12.016

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization is currently edited by Houser, D. and Puzzello, D.

More articles in Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().