Manuel Grieder, Deborah Kistler and Jan Schmitz ran a field experiment inside a Swiss environmental program for small businesses, published in Behavioural Public Policy in 2025. Consultants visited 173 firms and offered them free energy-efficiency items worth about 122 Swiss francs. In both conditions the consultant explained the items, and in both conditions the firm said which ones it wanted. The only thing that varied was how the order got placed. In one arm the consultant placed it on the spot. In the other, the firm was handed a QR code and a voucher number and asked to order online later, a process designed to take under five minutes.

Intentions to order were nearly identical across the two arms. Actual orders were not. In the direct arm, 91.7% of firms placed an order. In the sludge arm, 51.7% did. That is a forty point gap produced by five minutes of self-service, among people who had already said yes, for something free, with a consultant sitting in the room.

Hold that next to a finding that appears to point the opposite way. Christopher Olivola and Eldar Shafir documented what they called the martyrdom effect across five experiments in the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making in 2013. Willingness to contribute to a cause went up, not down, when the contribution process was expected to be painful and effortful rather than easy and pleasant. Their proposed mechanism was meaning: anticipated effort makes people ascribe greater significance to the act, and to their own participation in it. This is why a 5K raises money that a raffle cannot.

Both findings are real, and reconciling them is the whole job. Effort that the donor experiences as their contribution raises giving. Effort that stands between the donor and their contribution destroys it. The sector has one word, friction, for two things that run in opposite directions.

There is now direct neural evidence for the split. Ya Zheng, Rumeng Tang and colleagues used high-resolution EEG to separate physical effort from monetary reward, for self and for another person, published in eLife in 2026. They tracked the reward positivity, an early brain response to receiving a reward. For rewards benefiting the participant, the response grew stronger as effort increased. Effort enhanced the reward. For rewards benefiting someone else, the response weakened as effort increased. Effort discounted the reward. Dissociable patterns, in the same people, in the same session.

This is a laboratory paradigm with handgrip effort and small stakes, and nobody should read it as a study of donation forms. But it names the mechanism the two field findings share. In Neurogiving I describe the warm glow as the return the donor gets for giving. What this suggests is that the brain does not price all effort into that return the same way. Effort the donor claims as their own act appears to feed the reward. Effort spent on someone else's behalf appears to be subtracted from it.

Which gives you a test that does not require an fMRI. Whose effort is it, in the donor's own telling? If they would describe it as something they did, it is contribution. If they would describe it as something they had to get through, it is a tax on the warm glow you just spent an appeal creating.

This one takes about twenty minutes and you have to do it yourself.

Give to your own organization. Not a test transaction on a staging environment. Your own phone, on cellular rather than office wifi, from an email address nobody on staff recognizes, with a real card, for a real amount. Start where a donor would start, which is usually a link in an email or a social post rather than your homepage. Time it. Count every discrete thing you are asked to type, choose, confirm, or dismiss, including cookie banners, designation menus, tribute fields, and the checkbox asking whether you would like to cover the processing fee.

Then run the ownership test on each one. Would a donor describe this step as part of giving, or as something in the way of giving? Designation choice is often contribution: picking where the money goes is part of the act. Confirming your email address twice is never contribution. Most organizations find that the majority of their steps fail the test, and that at least one of them exists because a department asked for a field in 2019 and nobody has revisited it since.

The counterintuitive part, and the reason to do this before year-end rather than after: the steps most likely to fail are the ones added most recently, by the most well-intentioned people, for the most defensible internal reasons.

Research Sources

In Lab Notes Pro

The Pro edition takes on the third kind of friction, the kind that raises money and should still make you uncomfortable. A Salvation Army experiment found 26 to 33 percent of shoppers actively rerouting to avoid a verbal ask. Alongside those, a 2024 study of 255 US patients showing that administrative burden predicted not just abandonment but institutional distrust, and fell hardest on Medicaid patients, plus the OECD's audit methodology from sixteen governments. Then the breakdown across five programs, three failure modes, the donor's view from a parking lot, and an experiment designed to survive your database administrator.