Eight Mechanism, Seventeen Years Later

This contribution was originally published René's personal blog on November 7, 2024

By Rene Bekkers

How reliable is our knowledge on mechanisms that make people give? In a webinar organized by the European Research Network On Philanthropy (ERNOP) on December 10, 2024, I’ll answer this question, and I invite you to join the team that will do so. The idea is to identify which results have successfully been replicated in research that was conducted since the 2007 Science of Generosity working paper (Bekkers & Wiepking, 2007) in which Pamala Wiepking and I described eight mechanisms that make people give. It formed the basis for a paper in Nonprofit & Voluntary Sector Quarterly (Bekkers & Wiepking, 2011).

When we created our literature review, we tried to include all research reports that we could find, and simply summarized their results without paying attention to the quality of the research. We did distinguish between experiments and correlational evidence, but we had not looked closely at the data and the findings reported. In retrospect, this was naive. We now know that published research in the social sciences contains many results that are not robust, and replications tend to have smaller effects than original studies (Open Science Collective, 2015; Nosek et al., 2022). Some results may have been fraudulent, other reports are based on falsified data. The number of retractions is increasing (Tran, 2024; Van Noorden, 2023), and these are only the tip of an iceberg of questionable research (Bekkers, 2022).

So what I’d like to do in the coming month is summarize what we know for sure about mechanisms that make people give. If we only include research that follows best practices in open science and research transparency, what insights remain? In the ideal case, research plans are pre-registered before data are collected, and results are reproducible because data and code are shared. I expect very few studies to follow these best practices. In addition, I would like to see which findings that we reported in the literature review have been independently replicated, by other authors with other data.

The timeline on this project is short. I will present results on December 10 in an ERNOP webinar https://www.linkedin.com/events/ernopwebinar-whatwereallyknowab7257042996414550016/about/. Because I prefer to work as open and transparently as possible, I have created a draft of the plan for the project here. Would this be of interest to you? Let me know in an email [r dot bekkers at vu dot nl] describing your expertise and potential contribution to the project. The plan is open for comments; you can request access to the draft so you can add comments and make changes.

To get a sense of the volume of research on philanthropy since 2011, I’ve already collected some data in Google Scholar on the number of search results per year for six different keywords that we also used in the original literature review. Even for the most narrow search term, “charitable behavior”, the number of results increased strongly since 2000. The period after 2011 shows a continued increase in the number of studies from 148 in 2012 to 503 in 2023, a growth of 340%.

The number of results for "charitable behavior" is dwarfed by "charitable giving", showing an increase in the number of publications from 876 in 2000 to 4570 in 2023. This means that we will have to come up with a very stringent selection and sampling procedure to keep the project within feasible limits. To automate some of the coding, we could employ rule based classifications and machine learning (Ma et al., 2021).

References

Bekkers, R. (2022). Ten Meta Science Insights to Deal With the Credibility Crisis in the Social Sciences. SocArxiv Preprint, https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/rm4p8/

Bekkers, R. & Wiepking, P. (2007). Generosity and Philanthropy: A Literature Review. Report commissioned by the John Templeton Foundation. https://renebekkers.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/bekkers_wiepking_generosity_07.pdf

Bekkers, R. & Wiepking, P. (2011). A Literature Review of Empirical Studies of Philanthropy: Eight Mechanisms that Drive Charitable Giving. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 40(5): 924-973. https://doi.org/10.1177/0899764010380927

Ma, J., Ebeid, I.A., De Wit, A., Xu, M., Yang, Y., Bekkers, R. & Wiepking, P. (2021). Computational Social Science for Nonprofit Studies: Developing a Toolbox and Knowledge Base for the Field. Voluntas, 34: 52-63. https://osf.io/g9d8u/

Nosek, B. A., Hardwicke, T. E., Moshontz, H., Allard, A., Corker, K. S., Dreber, A., … & Vazire, S. (2022). Replicability, robustness, and reproducibility in psychological science. Annual Review of Psychology, 73(1), 719-748. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-020821-114157

Open Science Collaboration. (2015). Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science. Science, 349(6251). https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aac4716

Tran, N. (2024). The ‘publish or perish’ mentality is fuelling research paper retractions – and undermining science. The Conversation, 24 September 2024. https://theconversation.com/the-publish-or-perish-mentality-is-fuelling-research-paper-retractions-and-undermining-science-238983 

Van Noorden, R. (2023). More then 10,000 research papers were retracted in 2023 – a new record. Nature, 12 December 2023. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03974-8