Men donate more to online fundraising pages where the fundraiser is an attractive female, and donate competitively with others, a study has claimed today.

Researchers from University College London and University of Bristol found that men give more money when seeing that other men have donated large amounts. The study, Competitive Helping in Online Giving, which was published in Current Biology and funded by the Royal Society, found that people on average give about £10 more after seeing others’ large donations.

The report said that when the large donations are made by men to attractive female fundraisers, “subsequent donations from other men increase by a further £28 on average”.

Professor Sarah Smith, from the University of Bristol, co-authored the report. She said: “Fundraising pages provide a fascinating real-life laboratory for looking at charity donations. Previously, we saw how donors responded to how much other people had given. Now we see that the response depends – albeit subconsciously – on the fundraiser’s attractiveness.”

Some 2,561 fundraising pages from the 2014 London Marathon were reviewed, with 668 meeting the study's criteria – this being that each needed to include an image of the fundraiser whose gender was identified and attractiveness “verified independently”.

Pages also had to feature large donations from people who could be assigned to a gender to measure responses of subsequent donors. The study considered a large donation to be double the mean donation on the page and at least £50; it was typically around £100.

Researchers calculated the average donation of each fundraising page, using up to ten donations before a large sum was given. The responses of up to 15 donors following the large donation were then studied in 12 categories define by the gender and attractiveness of the fundraiser, and the gender of the person who made the large donation.

Each page was shown to four independent reviewers who rated how attractive they found the fundraiser on a scale of 0-10, with 10 being the highest. Both male and female fundraisers who were smiling were deemed to be more attractive than those who were not and received more donations.

The study found that women did not react in the same way as men in terms of competitive donating. However, more attractive fundraisers raised more money regardless of their gender.