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Spontaneous charitable donations in Sweden before and after COVID: A natural experiment

ABSTRACT: Abstract Did the outbreak of COVID‐19 influence spontaneous donation behavior? To investigate this, we conducted a natural experiment on real donation data. We analyzed the absolute amount, and the proportion of total payments, donated by individuals to charitable organizations via Swish—a widely used mobile online payment application through which most Swedes prefer to make their donations to charity—each day of 2019 and 2020. Spontaneous charitable donations were operationalized as Swish‐payments to numbers starting with 90, as this number is a nationally acknowledged quality control label that is provided to all fundraising operations that are monitored by the Swedish Fundraising Control. The results show that the Swish‐donations fluctuated substantially depending on season (less donations in January–February and during the summer months, and more donations in April–May and during the last months of the year) and specific events (peaks in Swish‐donations often coincided with televised charity fundraising galas). Interrupted time‐series analyses revealed that spontaneous donations were overall unaffected by the pandemic outbreak.

SUBMITTER: Erlandsson A

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9088531 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:BackgroundPeople with autism have abnormal preferences, ranging from an apparent lack of preference for social stimuli to unusually strong preferences for restricted sets of highly idiosyncratic stimuli. Yet the profile of preferences across social and nonsocial domains has not been mapped out in detail, and the processes responsible remain poorly understood.MethodsTo assess preferences across a range of stimuli, we measured real monetary donations to 50 charities spanning categories pertaining to people, mental health, animals, or the environment. We compared the donations made by 16 high-functioning adults with autism to those made by neurotypical controls matched on age, gender and education. We additionally collected ratings of how people evaluated the different charities.ResultsCompared with controls, high-functioning adults with autism donated less overall and also showed a significantly disproportionate reduction in donations to people charities compared with donations to the other charities. Furthermore, whereas controls discriminated strongly between different people charities, choosing to donate a lot of money to some and very little to others, much less discrimination was seen in the autism group. Ratings that probed how participants constructed their preferences did not differ between groups, except for a difference in the perceived impact of pictures and text information about people charities. Strikingly, there were some charities related to mental health, and autism in particular, to which the autism group donated considerably more than did the controls.ConclusionsPeople with autism were found to have reduced preference and sensitivity towards charities benefiting other people. The findings provide evidence for a domain-specific impairment in social cognition in autism spectrum disorder, and in particular in linking otherwise intact social knowledge to the construction of value signals on which preferences regarding other people are based.

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Spontaneous charitable donations in Sweden before and after COVID: A natural experiment

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