The Science of Giving: Experimental Approaches to The Study of Charity, an anthology of essays that explore the reasons that people give to charity as revealed by social science, was created by its editors, Daniel M. Oppenheimer and Christopher Y. Olivola, because they wondered, as many of us have, why there is such inconsistency in the way people give.
We've all noticed the disparities among a number of fairly recent catastrophes that have commanded media attention and a charitable response, such as the terrorist attacks on New York in 2001, the Asian Tsunami of 2004, Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and the 2010 disasters in Haiti and Pakistan.
The charitable response, and even the media response, was inconsistent across these disasters irrespective of death tolls. Fundraisers across the nonprofit world have wondered just what makes one disaster more attractive to donors than another.
At the same time, in recent years, more and more research has been done on charitable motivations by social scientists, shedding promising light on when, how, and why donors engage in altruistic behavior.
The editors, and individual authors, of The Science of Giving have pulled much of that research together, hoping that it will bring value to fundraisers as well as spurring more research and questions that might be answered through social science experimentation...Read More...
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