Charitable Giving, Self-Image and Personality

Résumé

We provide an experimental test of the role of self-signaling in decisions to do- nate to charity. Our data strongly supports the theoretical prediction of a non- monotonic, hill-shaped relationship between self-confidence, proxied by the Social Potency personality trait, and prosocial behavior motivated by image concerns. Making self-image concerns more salient can more than double donations by indi- viduals with medium self-confidence.