Task characteristics and charitable giving

We investigate experimentally the impact of nature of task performed for one's earnings on charitable giving behaviour. We find that donations are significantly higher for participants who were randomly allocated to a nonroutine problem-solving task compared to those participants who were randomly allocated to a routinized counting task, even though both tasks yielded equal earnings and similar pay satisfaction. Relative to the routine task, the nonroutine task causally increased task satisfaction and positive affect, and reduced negative affect. Correlational evidence suggests that the reduction in negative affect may have been the mechanism causing the increase in charitable donation due to the nonroutine task. The experiment was conducted online using Qualtrics with 192 subjects participating. The participants were a diverse pool of candidates from various undergraduate and post-graduate educational institutions in India.