Can repeated and reflective prosocial experiences in sport increase generosity in adolescent athletes?

ABSTRACT

In partnership with a sport-based Experiential Philanthropy Intervention – The Play Better Program – we conducted a pre-registered, longitudinal experiment examining whether repeatedly reflecting on prosocial activity could boost adolescents’ objective generosity. Adolescents (N = 114; aged 9–16) practiced charitable giving throughout their 2-month sports season and were randomly assigned to repeatedly reflect on the importance of their prosocial activity (Reflection condition) or to write about their everyday activities (Control condition). Adolescents completed an objective measure of generosity at pre- and post-intervention and self-reported measures of prosocial character. Across conditions, adolescents donated objectively more at post- vs. pre-intervention. However, adolescents in the Reflection (vs. Control) condition were no more generous and did not report greater prosocial character at post-intervention. Overall, these findings highlight the malleability of human prosociality and the need for additional scholar-practitioner collaborations to uncover whether and how Experiential Philanthropy Interventions boost long-term generosity among the next generation of givers.

KEYWORDS:

• Generosity
• charitable giving
• prosociality interventions
• reflection
• prosocial character development
• adolescence
• sport

Acknowledgments

The authors are deeply grateful to Ashley Whillans for her invaluable contributions and assistance with this project and manuscript. The authors would also like to thank Angie Fan, Devan Gill, Alyssa Greco, Christina Johnstone, Burdett Kwon, and Cassidy Ouldtata-Allan for their contributions to this study.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare the existence of a financial competing interest of the first author who holds a paid research consultation position at the partner organization (Charitable Impact) in addition to his position as a graduate student at Simon Fraser University.

Data availability statement

The data described in this article are openly available in the Open Science Framework at https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2023.2178955

Open scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badges for Open Data, Open Materials and Preregistered. The data and materials are openly accessible at https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2023.2178955.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2023.2178955.

Notes

1. We pre-registered that 21 participants had not provided physical ticket data at one or both dictator games. However, after conducting the analyses, we noted that there were two participants who had self-reported giving ‘0’ tickets but were entered as having no physical ticket data simply because they took the envelope of tickets home with them. Thus, to increase statistical power, we deviated from our pre-registration and included these two participants in our analyses. The pre-registered results are statistically identical without these participants.

2. We initially pre-registered to use Cronbach’s alpha to estimate the reliability of our measures. However, we later learned that a Spearman-Brown correlation (r_SB) would more accurately estimate reliability (Eisinga et al., 2013).

Additional information

Funding

This project was supported by a John Templeton Foundation Subaward administered through Baylor University under Grant number 32270245-05-CIF; the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada under grant number 1034640, and by Charitable Impact.