Men donate more to ‘stunners’

Men have fought over women since they were Neanderthals but they are also willing to put their money where their mouths are after a new study found blokes are likely to donate four times more cash to a fundraising “stunner” when another male makes a generous contribution.
The study, published in Current Biology, was carried out by two women; Nichola Raihani, of University College London, and Sarah Smith, of the University of Bristol.
To reach their findings, the researchers analysed data from an online fundraising platform based in the UK. Fundraisers using these platforms present their name, photo, charity and their sponsored event, before collecting donations – primarily from people they know.
All donations made to fundraising pages are shown in the order in which they are given, with the names and contributions of all donors visible to others. “This creates a potential tournament in which donors may compete by responding to how much others have given,” the report explains.
The team looked at 2,561 fundraising pages. The average number of donations per page was 42.8, while the average amount of money raised per page was £1,300.50.
“These results support a key prediction of competitive helping theory by showing that male donors compete directly with other males in the presence of an attractive, opposite-sex audience, although we find no evidence for this in females,” says the report.
However, the authors do not believe men donate more to attractive female fundraisers in response to other male donors because they think it will make themselves appear more attractive. Instead, she believes it is down to evolution.
“I think it is 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,” Raihani explained. “People are really generous and are right, a lot of the time, to say that their motives for giving to charity are altruistic, not self-serving. This does not, however, preclude these motives from having evolved to benefit the donor in some way.”