Pivotal or popular: The effects of social information and feeling pivotal on civic actions

We examine the combined effects of popularity and feelings of being important to reaching a goal by testing how people react to (1) situations in which their own behavior is pivotal or not, as well as (2) the popularity of the action. We conduct a laboratory experiment to cleanly fix beliefs about the person's likelihood of being pivotal in reaching a donation threshold that triggers a matching gift, varying both the pivotality and the number of other donors (popularity). The results are striking in that a person whose action is pivotal is more than twice as likely to make a donation, an increase of approximately 30 percentage points. Popularity, in contrast, is not influential. To test these findings in a more natural setting, we conduct two field experiments, neither of which demonstrates meaningful effects. Our results suggest that pivotality is a more important determinant of prosocial behavior, but that it can be a challenge to leverage this finding to meaningfully improve outcomes in the field.