PROFESSOR RUSSELL JAMES:

And I'll throw out there, I think it's a good idea because it creates a social norm that says, hey, you know, yeah, our donors support us in lots of ways. And this includes gifts and wills, here's what a recent gift in a will did.

Now, you know, ideally, you would like to match that social norm. And what I, what I mean by that is, if you are communicating with your mass audience, don't spend all of your time on the billion-dollar bequest, because that's not going to create a social norm. That's going to say, this is not the sort of thing you do. This is what those other people do. Right?

And so, so I if you want to create a social norm, that what you're trying to communicate is that people like me make gifts like this, if you tell me Joan Kroc story that doesn't help, because that is not people like me, who make gifts like this, it doesn't create that that social norm.

And I'll throw out there you know, we use these kinds of insider terms, the pursuit of symbolic immortality, you know, the idea of investing in long term social impact is another way to think of it that idea from a research perspective also encompasses an experimental reality, which is whenever death becomes salient, people become much more interested in following the social norm.

So social norms are always powerful. But in any death-related contexts like estate planning, the power of social norms goes way up.

Symbolic immortality is a lot about what will they think about me when I'm gone? So this issue of what will they think about me, in other words, social norms, because it really ramps up.

And so it's one of the reasons why I didn't mention but in that, in that study from England, of people doing their real wheel documents, there was a third group, they were not simply asked, "Would you like to leave a gift to charity in your will?" They were instead asked the question this way. The question started with a social norm statement.

"Many of our customers like to leave money to charity in their will," then asking the question about leaving a gift that social norm statement, as compared to the group that wasn't asked anything. 5% included charity, the group that asked us were asked the standard question 10% included charity; the group that were asked that question 15.6% included charity, and not only did it triple the share of people actually including charity in their real world documents, but the average gift size in that final group was double what it was in the previous two groups.

What it shows you is in a death-related context, social norms become extraordinarily powerful. That's why for example, if you see like a study or a newspaper article on defaults, oftentimes they will talk about defaults in areas such as, such as organ donation, right?

Defaults are massively powerful in organ donation? Well, again, it's a death-related context. And if you say, you know, well, you have to check the box to change your mind from what's normal, people won't check that box because it's a death-related context. And so social norms are much more powerful in these death-related contexts.

So that's actually, as a researcher, that's actually part of this pursuit of symbolic immortality. It's about, "What will they say about me when I'm gone?" Which starts with, "What will they say about me?"

And that's the social norm idea.