Instantaneous positive reinforcement does not increase donations: Evidence from online experiments

Historically, positive reinforcement (PRI) for charitable giving happens after the fact, e.g., thank-you letters and gifts from the charities to donors. With the increasing prevalence of online giving, there exists an opportunity for less costly instantaneous PRI. Our study attempts to provide proof of concept of the effectiveness of instantaneous PRI. We report evidence from two large-scale online experiments. We conducted Experiment 1 on MTurk using Cloud Research (n = 2,375) and a conceptual replication on Prolific (n = 1,572). Participants are randomly assigned to either receive no PRI, or PRI in the form of a thumbs up emoji that is either static (same size), or dynamic (varies in size with the size of the donation). Consistent with much of the findings on after-the-fact PRI, in both experiments we do not find evidence that instantaneous PRI increases donation behavior compared to the baseline. These results suggest that organizations and policymakers should be cautious when deciding to use instantaneous PRI.