EXPRESS: Impatient for Impact: Intertemporal Preferences for Earlier Donation Impact Timing

Impatience when choosing for oneself has been widely documented, but are people also impatient when making prosocial decisions about benefits to unknown others? The authors study whether and why people care about a donation’s “impact timing,” the time when the benefits of the donation would reach the beneficiaries. In seven pre-registered experiments (N = 2,462) and an analysis of GoFundMe secondary data, they show that people consistently prefer to donate to a charitable program with an earlier impact timing, across different causes, donation amounts, timeframes, charity sizes and tradeoffs between impact timing and other considerations (impact magnitude, number of prior donors, remaining cost to complete, quality rating, and overhead). They find that decreased perceived benefits of delayed donation impact provides an incomplete explanation of the impact timing preference. Beyond less discounting of less delayed benefits, people also infer greater donation efficacy-based trust from earlier impact timing, increasing donation preferences. Together, the strong preference for earlier impact timing is an important and largely overlooked aspect of prosocial decision-making, with implications for building trust in prosocial organizations.