From slacktivism to activism: Improving the commitment power of e-pledges for prosocial causes

Eileen Y Chou, Dennis Y Hsu and Eileen Hernon

PLOS ONE, 2020, vol. 15, issue 4, 1-21

Abstract: Prosocial organizations increasingly rely on e-pledges to promote their causes and secure commitment. Yet their effectiveness is controversial. Epitomized by UNICEF’s “Likes Don’t Save Lives” campaign, the threat of slacktivism has led some organizations to forsake social media as a potential platform for garnering commitment. We proposed and investigated a novel e-pledging method that may enable organizations to capitalize on the benefits of e-pledging without compromising on its mass outreach potential. In two pilot studies, we first explored whether and why conventional e-pledges may not be as effective as intended. Building on those insights, we conducted one field and two lab experiments to test our proposed e-pledge intervention. Importantly, the field study demonstrated the effectiveness of the intervention for commitment behavior across a 3-month period. The laboratory experiments provided a deeper and more refined mechanism understanding of the effect and ruled out effort, novelty, and social interaction mindset as alternative explanations for why the intervention may be effective. As technological innovations continue to redefine how people interact with the world, this research sheds light on a promising method for transforming a simple virtual acknowledgment into deeper commitment—and, ideally, to action.

Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0231314 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 31314&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:plo:pone00:0231314

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0231314

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().