Active decisions and pro-social behavior: A field experiment on blood donation

Lorenz Goette, Alois Stutzer and Michael Zehnder

Natural Field Experiments from The Field Experiments Website

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a decision framework where people are individually asked to either actively consent or dissent to some pro-social behavior. We hypothesize that confronting individuals with the choice of engaging in a specific pro-social behavior contributes to the formation of issue-specific altruistic preferences while simultaneously involving a commitment. The hypothesis is tested in a large-scale field experiment on blood donation. We find that this "active-decision" intervention substantially increases the stated willingness to donate blood, as well as the actual donation behavior of people who have not fully formed preferences beforehand.

Date: 2006
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://s3.amazonaws.com/fieldexperiments-papers2/papers/00335.pdf

Related works:
Journal Article: Active Decisions and Prosocial Behaviour: a Field Experiment on Blood Donation (2011)
Working Paper: Active decisions and pro-social behavior: a field experiment on blood donation (2006)
Working Paper: Active Decisions and Pro-social Behavior: A Field Experiment on Blood Donation (2006)
Working Paper: Active Decisions and Pro-social Behavior: A Field Experiment on Blood Donation (2006)
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:feb:natura:00335

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Natural Field Experiments from The Field Experiments Website
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Francesca Pagnotta ().