TY - GEN
T1 - Anonymity in COVID-19 Online Donations
T2 - Future of Information and Communication Conference, FICC 2021
AU - Firmansyah, Firman M.
AU - Pratama, Ahmad R.
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
PY - 2021
Y1 - 2021
N2 - Donating money anonymously is often perceived as an act of altruism in Western culture and a similar concept of ‘ikhlas’ (sincerity) in Indonesia. Yet, this prosocial behavior can also be utilized to cope with unpleasant feelings associated with such donations (e.g., fear of social judgment, guilt) making it otherwise a rather self-serving act. In that regard, we analyzed 20,000 individual donation transactions made for COVID-19 campaigns on two popular fundraising platforms: GoFundMe in the United States and Kitabisa in Indonesia. We found that GoFundMe donors tended to self-identify (33.18% opted for anonymity) while Kitabisa donors tended to conceal their identities (73.89% opted for anonymity). Adjusting the donations to the fractions of GDPs, we further found that anonymous donors on Kitabisa donated significantly less amounts of money (M =.11, SD =.54) in contrast to their self-identified counterparts (M =.26, SD = 3.63), who donated even higher amounts of money than anonymous donors on GoFundMe (M =.16, SD =.66). Even though the amount of money may not always entail the rate of altruism nor ikhlas, the significant findings bring the cultural belief associated with such anonymous donations into questions.
AB - Donating money anonymously is often perceived as an act of altruism in Western culture and a similar concept of ‘ikhlas’ (sincerity) in Indonesia. Yet, this prosocial behavior can also be utilized to cope with unpleasant feelings associated with such donations (e.g., fear of social judgment, guilt) making it otherwise a rather self-serving act. In that regard, we analyzed 20,000 individual donation transactions made for COVID-19 campaigns on two popular fundraising platforms: GoFundMe in the United States and Kitabisa in Indonesia. We found that GoFundMe donors tended to self-identify (33.18% opted for anonymity) while Kitabisa donors tended to conceal their identities (73.89% opted for anonymity). Adjusting the donations to the fractions of GDPs, we further found that anonymous donors on Kitabisa donated significantly less amounts of money (M =.11, SD =.54) in contrast to their self-identified counterparts (M =.26, SD = 3.63), who donated even higher amounts of money than anonymous donors on GoFundMe (M =.16, SD =.66). Even though the amount of money may not always entail the rate of altruism nor ikhlas, the significant findings bring the cultural belief associated with such anonymous donations into questions.
KW - Altruism
KW - COVID-19
KW - Ikhlas
KW - Online donation
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/85105962456
U2 - 10.1007/978-3-030-73103-8_3
DO - 10.1007/978-3-030-73103-8_3
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85105962456
SN - 9783030731021
T3 - Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing
SP - 34
EP - 47
BT - Advances in Information and Communication - Proceedings of the 2021 Future of Information and Communication Conference, FICC
A2 - Arai, Kohei
PB - Springer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH
Y2 - 29 April 2021 through 30 April 2021
ER -