Answering for yourself versus others: Direct versus indirect estimates of charitable donations

When researchers ask about behavior in ethical contexts such as charitable giving, they sometimes use indirect questions (e.g., “what would another student donate?”), to allow people to project their actual desires onto the other without social desirability concerns. Despite their prevalence, there is a surfeit of research on whether indirect measures reflect actual behavior better than direct questions (e.g., “how much would you donate”). We addressed this study question, focusing on sensitivity accuracy, which is whether the measure moves up or down as actual behavior does. To measure sensitivity, we elicited direct, indirect, and actual monetary donations from each respondent. Across four studies, and many controls and manipulations, direct measures were significantly more sensitive than indirect measures. Our findings argue for caution in the use of indirect measures of prosocial behavior and also appear to rule out projection as the only/primary driver of indirect responses. Happily, though, these results provide a potential bright spot for researchers: with some minor guidelines and adjustments, direct measures can be, we argue, profitably used to estimate actual behavior in ethical domains.