A new study out of the University of Michigan finds that charitable lenders who belong to a team provide significantly more loans than those acting on their own. Led by economists and computer scientists, the project team studied the behavior of more than 60,000 members of the online lending community Kiva. Based on randomized field experiments and other statistical techniques, the researchers say team membership appears not to simply correlate with greater contribution, but to outright cause it.
Charitable organizations typically focus appeals on individuals, but the researchers say their studies highlight the underexplored potential of team-based approaches. They wanted to study what motivates people to lend, but early in their investigations they noticed that team membership seemed to have a huge effect. The research has additional implications for charitable giving organizations. It demonstrates that teams can discourage free-riding and prod people toward so-called "pro-social" behavior conduct that benefits the public good.