IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/econjl/v133y2023i655p2844-2860..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Preheating Prosocial Behaviour

Author

Listed:
  • Casey J Wichman
  • Nathan W Chan

Abstract

We provide new evidence on motivations for voluntary contributions to public goods in a natural setting. Using natural language processing on users’ Twitter posts, we measure revealed sentiment changes before and after making a donation to Wikipedia. We find strong evidence that sentiment improves in the hour and minutes directly before contributing, which we call ‘preheating’. Results are robust to alternative fixed effects and approaches to inference and supported by a complementary online experiment with randomised mood inducement among Twitter users. Preheating suggests that affective states influence giving in addition to reward-seeking, utility-maximising behaviour that has been documented in other contexts.

Suggested Citation

  • Casey J Wichman & Nathan W Chan, 2023. "Preheating Prosocial Behaviour," The Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 133(655), pages 2844-2860.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:econjl:v:133:y:2023:i:655:p:2844-2860.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/ej/uead041
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:econjl:v:133:y:2023:i:655:p:2844-2860.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press or the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/resssea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.