Study: Men donate more to charity when the fundraiser is an attractive woman

Charity donations — The Fox Sports North Girls accept food donations for charity prior to the game between the Minnesota Wild and the St. Louis Blues at the Xcel Energy Center on November 19, 2011 in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Getty Images

According to a new study by researchers in the UK, it has been concluded that the best means of getting men to donate is to line up attractive women as fundraisers.

Researchers have discovered that attractive women and competition, where men see other men donate large amounts, is more likely to drive men towards donating more to charity.

Men put a higher emphasis on signals of fertility such as youth and hip-to-waist ratio, while women tend to put greater stress on resources such as wealth and social status. One way that men can signal these resources is to make an ostentatious display of wealth, such as making big donations to these fundraising websites.

- Nichola Raihani, University College London

In contrast, women appear to be unaffected by the attractiveness of male fundraisers when giving charitable donations.

The study thus concludes a major biological contrast between men and women in terms of what motivates each gender towards charitable donations.

Professor Sarah Smith of the University of Bristol, who co-authored the study, said, reported The Independent: "This creates a potential tournament in which donors may compete by responding to how much others have given.

"Fundraising pages provide a fascinating real-life laboratory for looking at charity donations....now we see that the response depends, albeit subconsciously, on the fundraiser's attractiveness."

The study focused on 700 fundraising sites from the 2014 Virgin London Marathon that featured a picture of the fundraiser on the site.

Members of the opposite sex were asked to rate the attractiveness of the fundraiser using a 10-point score.

The study revealed that on average when men saw large donations to attractive female fundraisers by other men, they raised their donations by £28.

Nichola Raihani of University College London, the lead author of the study, said: "I think it's more likely that humans have an evolved psychology that motivates us to behave in ways that would have been, on average, adaptive in our evolutionary past, and may still be nowadays also.

"Men put a higher emphasis on signals of fertility such as youth and hip-to-waist ratio, while women tend to put greater stress on resources such as wealth and social status.

"One way that men can signal these resources is to make an ostentatious display of wealth, such as making big donations to these fundraising websites."