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Subliminal influence on generosity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

Ola Andersson ,
Topi Miettinen ,
Kaisa Hytönen ,
Magnus Johannesson  and
Ute Stephan
Ola Andersson
Affiliation:
Research Institute of Industrial Economics, Stockholm, Sweden Lund University, Lund, Sweden
Topi Miettinen*
Affiliation:
Hanken School of Economics, Helsinki, Finland Helsinki Center of Economic Research (HECER), Helsinki, Finland PCRClab, University of Turku, Turku, Finland
Kaisa Hytönen
Affiliation:
Aalto University, Espoo, Finland Laurea University of Applied Sciences, Vantaa, Finland
Magnus Johannesson
Affiliation:
Stockholm School of Economics, Stockholm, Sweden
Ute Stephan
Affiliation:
Aston Business School, Birmingham, UK
*
[email protected]
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Abstract

We experimentally subliminally prime subjects prior to charity donation decisions by showing words that have connotations of pro-social values for a very brief time (17 ms). Our main finding is that, compared to a baseline condition, the pro-social prime increases donations by approximately 10–17 % among subjects with strong pro-social preferences (universalism values). We find a similar effect when interacting the prime with the Big 5 personality characteristic of agreeableness. We furthermore introduce a novel method for testing for priming, “subliminity”. This method reveals that some subjects are capable of recognizing prime words, and the overall results are weaker when we control for this capacity.

Keywords

CharitySubliminalPrimingUniversalismValuesPersonalityPro-social
Type
Original Paper
Information
Experimental Economics , Volume 20 , Issue 3 , September 2017 , pp. 531 - 555
Copyright
Copyright © 2016 Economic Science Association

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Footnotes

Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:https://doi.org/10.1007/s10683-016-9498-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

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