Seminar

Moral wiggle-room explains the inefficacy of polite requests for charity donations

Jean-François Bonnefon (TSE)

November 22, 2016, 14:00–15:30

Room MS001

TSE internal seminars

Abstract

People are more likely to give to charities when they receive a request to do so, and considerable work has been devoted to identifying the elements of a successful request. We extend this research by exploring a common everyday tactic for increasing compliance: asking politely. We report six experiments offering decisive evidence for the hypothesis that people use perceptions of politeness as moral wiggle room for declining costly requests. Increasing the linguistic politeness of a request does not increase its perceived politeness, and does not increase the likelihood of a donation---but the perceived politeness of the request is always lower for people who do not make a donation, independently of its phrasing. In sum, we provide the first demonstration of a new tactic that people may use for justifying non-compliance to prosocial requests, namely, the biased subjective assessment of the politeness of the request. In the context of charity fundraising, the moral wiggle room afforded by this subjective assessment explains why the polite phrasing of requests fails to elicit more donations. Accordingly, restricting moral wiggle room may be more efficient for fundraising success than asking politely.