Does collaborative giving boost generosity and foster closeness between peers?

Abstract

People often make charitable donations together with other people, including friends or romantic partners. Past work suggests that this collaborative giving might both boost generosity and foster closeness with others, but most work is correlational, mixed, and limited. Thus, we conducted a pre-registered experiment with 155 pairs of unacquainted undergraduate peers. Each participant earned $5 for evaluating a charitable advertisement. Afterwards, we randomly assigned pairs to decide how much to donate to a charity either together in the collaborative giving condition, or individually in or out of each other’s presence in the independent and private giving conditions, respectively. Participants then privately rated how close they felt with one another. Collaborative giving pairs were no more generous but felt closer to one another than either independent or private giving pairs. Collaborative giving may foster closeness between peers, but future experiments must disentangle how unique this effect is compared to other collaborative tasks.