This is a fantastic idea. Congratulations to all involved. 

Out of curiosity, does GD have any data on whether other religions donate a portion of their tithe/tzdaka/etc to GD? 

This is fantastic news!

As an experimental economist, I hope this has spillovers to our field (as well as others).  

At the feedback level (referee reports, presentations etc), I believe there is significantly more value to be gained when discussing the experimental design itself before any data is collected. 

Congrats to Hauke, Chris, and all others involved.

Thanks Catherine. We just used the platform Prolific for subject recruitment.

Thanks David, that would be great! I'll check to see if there is a way to run it on STATA, but if not I can just run it on R. 

In experiment 1, condition on them donating they actually donated significantly less in the Moral Demandingness condition (but this didn't replicate in E2). 

Can you DM me about the model, I am happy to run that analysis. We ran mean equivalence tests to provide evidence of the bounds of the null result, but I believe what you are suggesting is quite different.  

In experiment 1, condition on them donating they actually donated significantly less in the Moral Demandingness condition (but this didn't replicate in E2). 

Can you DM me about the model, I am happy to run that analysis. We ran mean equivalence tests to provide evidence of the bounds of the null result, but I believe what you are suggesting is quite different.  

Thanks Scott, that's a really good point. 

One of the variables we thought about manipulating was "who is the demand coming from"? The use of language here "I", "We" and other expressions could easily make a difference (social norms are usually presented in terms of "X% of people believe").

 Unfortunately, we didn't have the budget to test whether how much of a difference (if any) this made. It would definitely be worth following up on if we were able to get the funding. 

Thanks Ariel. That's a great question. 

We checked a number of different correlations cross both studies, including altruistic type, how utilitarian they are, guilt, how manipulated they felt, agreeableness, and a number of demographic characteristics including religion. 

We didn't find anything in our regression analysis that stood out. However, we reported everything in the appendix, which can be accessed in the paper. Alternatively, I can send it to you. 

I guess another question is who is the obligation coming from? In our experiments it was either from us or GWWC. With regards to religion, if it is in scripture or communicated by a religious figure (such as a rabbi or a priest), maybe it holds more weight? Also, the norms regarding giving are different to secular norms. 

We didn't measure how convinced they were by the argument (in hindsight we probably should have), but we did ask how obligated they felt and obligations ratings were significantly higher in the Moral Argument treatment than the control. That correlation may be explained by finding the argument more convincing, but we don't have any concrete evidence (from this study) to strongly update our beliefs. 

In that case, a better title would probably be something like "Tell people why they should donate, not that they  morally obligated to."* 

I had a strong prior that telling people they were morally obligated to donate would not have a positive effect and if anything backfire. So I have actually updated a bit in the other direction regarding the backfire effect. 

However, given we have evidence that moral demandingness  didn't produce any positive outcomes, I would currently tell people not to use them and instead stick to moral arguments (which may even be underused given how effective they are).  

In saying that,  further research is  needed, as there isn't much of a literature at the moment. 

*Can I change the title? 

That's very fair! I'm not familiar with the norms for EA Forum title posts. What do you think a better title would be?