Research Offers Clues on Ice-Bucket Challenge’s Success

The New York Times Magazine reviews research on giving behavior that could help explain why the ice-bucket challenge pierced the mental buffer that causes many people to avoid or ignore charity appeals and became a $115-million fundraising sensation.

The challenge’s public nature—forecasting reputation damage for those who refused to dump ice water on themselves to help fight neurological disease ALS—and its 24-hour deadline worked in its favor, said Sander van der Linden, a social psychologist at Princeton University. “When you make people set specific goals, they become more likely to change behavior,” he told the magazine.

Another factor could be the “martyrdom effect” reported in a paper last year by researchers from Princeton and Carnegie Mellon University, who found that people are often more generous if contributing involves physical pain or discomfort. “We’re supposed to prefer pleasure to pain but, when it comes to charity, you don’t hear about massage-a-thons or dessert-a-thons,” said Carnegie Mellon’s Christopher Olivola. “Instead, you encounter charity marathons or the ice-bucket challenge.”