Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 476

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 53 of the 53 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Avoiding the Ask: A Field Experiment on Altruism, Empathy, and Charitable Giving

Andreoni, James, Rao, Justin M., Trachtman, Hannah·2017·Journal of Political Economy
DOI 10.1086/691703
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

If people enjoy giving, then why do they avoid fund-raisers? Partnering with the Salvation Army at Christmastime, we conducted a randomized field experiment placing bell ringers at one or both main entrances to a supermarket, making it easy or difficult to avoid the ask. Additionally, bell ringers either were silent or said “please give.” Making avoidance difficult increased both the rate of giving and donations. Paradoxically, the verbal ask dramatically increased giving but also led to dramatic avoidance. We argue that this illustrates sophisticated awareness of the empathy-altruism link: people avoid empathic stimulation to regulate their giving and guilt.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1086/691703

Cites

53 of 53 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Show all 53 references

Cited by

See all 476

Metadata

Authors
Andreoni, J., Rao, J. M., & Trachtman, H.
Venue
Journal of Political Economy
Publisher
University of Chicago Press
Published
2017-06
Volume
125
Issue
3
Pages
625-653
ISSN
  • 0022-3808 (ISSN-L)
  • 1537-534X
DOI
10.1086/691703
OpenAlex
W1594039429
Cited by
476
References
53
FWCI
95.15
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

How to cite

Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Avoiding the Ask: A Field Experiment on Altruism, Empathy, and Charitable Giving. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1086/691703
The paper
Andreoni, J., Rao, J. M., & Trachtman, H. (2017). Avoiding the Ask: A Field Experiment on Altruism, Empathy, and Charitable Giving. Journal of Political Economy. https://doi.org/10.1086/691703

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.