When people feel happier, they’re more likely to donate to charity. That’s what we, two economists who study what motivates environmentally conscientious consumption and support for free services, found in a new study published in The Economic Journal.
When people feel happier, they’re more likely to donate to charity. That’s what we, two economists who study what motivates environmentally conscientious consumption and support for free services, found in a new study published in The Economic Journal.
To conduct this research, we analyzed tweets from over 20,000 Twitter users who used the hashtag „#iloveWikipedia.“ That slogan is part of a template that Wikipedia suggests to anyone who has just completed a donation on its online platform, so it helped us identify people who have given money to the free online encyclopedia edited by volunteers. Those donations funded the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that hosts Wikipedia.
We evaluated the donors‘ moods by using natural language processing tools. These tools assigned a score to each tweet to indicate how positive or negative the mood was for each tweet.
For example, a tweet that says „Woohoo! Awesome Pete!“ would get a positive sentiment score, while one that says „THIS MADE ME CRY OUT OF ANGER AND SADNESS AND FRUSTRATION.
