The differential impact of social norms cues on charitable contributions

•We test the effect of social norms cues on donations for a public library.•We show that donations are affected by the reciprocity cue or the eyespots cue.•Conditional on donating, eyespots cues yield just over $30 more than a baseline.•Conditional on donating, reciprocity cues yield just over $6 more than a baseline. Using a field experiment, we test the channel by which normative cues affect the decision process to donate to a public library. Our treatments consist of a reciprocity cue or an eyespots cue that is placed on the solicitation materials mailed out to potential donors during a public library fundraising drive. The data are consistent with a two stage decision process by which individuals first decide whether to make a donation and then decide how much to donate. We show that both cues significantly affect donation behavior by enhancing the intensity of the behavior while only one cue enhances the likelihood of engaging in the behavior. These results imply that what might look like a subtle or even fickle effect of normative cues on behavior is an economically sizable effect when we take into account what aspect of the decision process is affected by the cue.