Warm Glow Giving
The Basic Idea
Imagine that you’re checking out your items at a shopping store, when the cashier asks if you would like to make a donation to a particular charity. Would you agree to make a donation? If so, would you be doing it because you genuinely want to, because you’ll feel better about yourself if you do, or because you feel like you should?
Warm glow giving is a behavioral economic theory that considers the personal gains - such as emotional rewards - that giving to others evokes.1 According to the theory, “warm glow” is the satisfaction people experience from “doing their part.” However, at the core of warm glow is the selfish pleasure that we feel as a result of our behavior. People’s motivation for their giving behaviors can either be impurely altruistic - motivated by the prospect of awards such as praise and respect - or purely altruistic - motivated by a genuine joy of giving.
It appears to be a matter of fact, that the circumstance of utility, in all subjects, is a source of praise and approbation … It is inseparable from all the other social virtues, humanity, generosity, charity, affability, levity, mercy and moderation.
– David Hume, philosopher and author of An Inquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals
About the Authors
Dan Pilat
Dan is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at The Decision Lab. He is a bestselling author of Intention - a book he wrote with Wiley on the mindful application of behavioral science in organizations. Dan has a background in organizational decision making, with a BComm in Decision & Information Systems from McGill University. He has worked on enterprise-level behavioral architecture at TD Securities and BMO Capital Markets, where he advised management on the implementation of systems processing billions of dollars per week. Driven by an appetite for the latest in technology, Dan created a course on business intelligence and lectured at McGill University, and has applied behavioral science to topics such as augmented and virtual reality.
Dr. Sekoul Krastev
Dr. Sekoul Krastev is a decision scientist and Co-Founder of The Decision Lab, one of the world's leading behavioral science consultancies. His team works with large organizations—Fortune 500 companies, governments, foundations and supernationals—to apply behavioral science and decision theory for social good. He holds a PhD in neuroscience from McGill University and is currently a visiting scholar at NYU. His work has been featured in academic journals as well as in The New York Times, Forbes, and Bloomberg. He is also the author of Intention (Wiley, 2024), a bestselling book on the science of human agency. Before founding The Decision Lab, he worked at the Boston Consulting Group and Google.
