The giver
Robb Willer, Christopher Wimer & Lindsay Owens
Social Science Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
We draw upon past research on gender and prosocial emotions in hypothesizing that empathy can help explain the gender gap in charitable giving. In a nationally representative survey, we found that men reported less willingness to give money or volunteer time to a poverty relief organization, gaps that were mediated by men’s lower reported feelings of empathy toward others. We also experimentally tested how effective a variety of different ways of framing poverty relief were for promoting giving. Framing poverty as an issue that negatively affects all Americans increased men’s willingness to donate to the cause, eliminating the gender gap. Mediation analysis revealed that this “aligned self-interest” framing worked by increasing men’s reported poverty concern, not by changing their understanding of the causes of poverty. Thus, while men were generally less motivated by empathy, they responded to a framing that recast charitable giving as consistent with their self-interest. Exposure to the same framing, however, led women to report lower willingness to volunteer time for poverty relief, suggesting that framing giving as consistent with self-interest may discourage those who give because of an empathic response to poverty.
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Corporate Philanthropy and Productivity: Evidence from an Online Real Effort Experiment
Mirco Tonin & Michael Vlassopoulos
Management Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Contributing to a social cause can be an important driver for workers in the public and nonprofit sectors as well as in firms that engage in corporate philanthropy or other corporate social responsibility policies. This paper compares the effectiveness of a social incentive that takes the form of a donation received by a charity of the subject’s choice to a financial incentive. We find that social incentives lead to a 13% rise in productivity, regardless of their form (lump sum or related to performance) or strength. The response is strong for subjects with low initial productivity (30%), whereas high-productivity subjects do not respond. When subjects can choose the mix of incentives, half sacrifice some of their private compensation to increase social compensation, with women more likely to do so than men. Furthermore, offering subjects some discretion in choosing their own payment schemes leads to a substantial improvement in performance. Comparing social incentives to equally costly increases in private compensation for low-productivity subjects reveals that the former are less effective in increasing productivity, but the difference is small and not statistically significant.
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The impact of mortality salience on the relative effectiveness of donation appeals
Fengyan Cai & Robert Wyer
Journal of Consumer Psychology, January 2015, Pages 101–112
Abstract:
Some donation appeals emphasize the magnitude of the help that is needed. Other, “bandwagon” appeals emphasize the fact that many others have already donated. The relative effectiveness of these appeals can depend on individuals' awareness of their mortality. Four experiments converge on the conclusion that need-focused appeals are effective when individuals are not conscious of their own mortality. When people's mortality is salient, however, bandwagon appeals have relatively greater influence. This is particularly true when others' donations have put the goal of the donation campaign within reach. These effects are evident when people have little a priori interest in the individuals being helped and sympathy does not play a major role in donation decisions.
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Avoiding affection, avoiding altruism: Why is avoidant attachment related to less helping?
Stephanie Richman, Nathan DeWall & Michelle Wolff
Personality and Individual Differences, April 2015, Pages 193–197
Abstract:
Avoidantly, compared to securely, attached people help less often and perceive the costs of helping as more severe. Helping relates to empathy and closeness, which may cause avoidantly attached people discomfort. We tested the hypothesis that reducing the potential for emotional closeness for avoidantly attached people would offset their unhelpfulness with one correlational and one experimental study. In Study 1, amongst a sample of 234 people on Mechanical Turk, avoidant attachment related to donating less money to human- and animal-related charities, but not a charity that did not foster emotional closeness. This relationship was mediated by empathy. In Study 2, amongst a sample of 193 college students, avoidantly attached people who believed that their emotions were temporarily unchangeable helped as much as people low in avoidant attachment. Reducing the potential emotional cost of helping increases helping amongst people who are avoidantly attached.
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When Bystanders Increase Rather Than Decrease Intentions to Help
Tobias Greitemeyer & Dirk Oliver Mügge
Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
The bystander effect refers to the phenomenon that the presence of others inhibits helping behavior. The present research examines the idea that the bystander effect reverses when effective helping would require many help-givers. In a between-participants experiment, the number of help-givers needed as well as the number of individuals who were asked for help was varied. When one help-giver was needed, the typical bystander effect occurred in that helping intention was greater when one individual was asked rather than many. In contrast, when many help-givers were needed, the bystander effect reversed in that helping intention was greater when many individuals were asked rather than one. Mediation analyses showed that perceived rationality and diffusion of responsibility accounted for the bystander effect, whereas only perceived rationality accounted for its reversal.
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Organ Donation by Suicides: Sex and Ethnicity
David Lester & Dominique Hathaway
Psychological Reports, December 2014, Pages 948-950
Abstract:
An analysis of 2,034 actual organ donations by suicides for the years 2008–2010 indicated that women were more likely to be donors than were men and Blacks more likely to donate than were Whites. The sex difference was consistent with the responses of men and women to surveys of the general public about their willingness to become organ donors, but the ethnic difference was the reverse of the responses to surveys of the general public about their willingness to be organ donors. Future research should explore the role of the responses, positive vs negative toward organ donation, of the significant others of those dying from different causes of death, and the extent to which people have signed donor cards.
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Evert van Doorn, Gerben van Kleef & Joop van der Pligt
Motivation and Emotion, February 2015, Pages 128-141
Abstract:
People often express emotion to influence others, for instance when making a request. Yet, surprisingly little is known about how such emotional expressions shape compliance. We investigated the interpersonal effects of anger and disappointment on compliance with requests. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants were more willing to offer help and donate to charity when a request was accompanied by disappointment rather than anger or no emotion. In Experiment 3, which involved a behavioral paradigm, emotional expressions trumped the effect of an explicit descriptive norm: Expressions of disappointment fostered generosity despite a non-generous norm, and expressions of anger undermined generosity despite a generous norm. Mediation analyses in Experiments 2 and 3 revealed that disappointment was more effective than anger in eliciting compliance because it was perceived as more appropriate for the context. Findings are discussed in relation to theorizing on social influence and the social functions of emotions.
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Money, Depletion, and Prosociality in the Dictator Game
Anja Achtziger, Carlos Alós-Ferrer & Alexander Wagner
Journal of Neuroscience, Psychology, and Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
We study the effects of ego depletion, a manipulation which consumes self-control resources, on social preferences in a dictator game. Depleted dictators give considerably less than nondepleted dictators and hence exhibit strong preferences for selfish allocation. In contrast to earlier studies, participants were explicitly paid for completing the ego-depletion task (with either a flat rate or strictly performance-based payment). We studied the dynamics of decisions by repeating the dictator game 12 times (anonymously). Depleted dictators start with much lower offers than nondepleted ones, but, strikingly, offers decrease in time for both groups, and more rapidly so for nondepleted dictators. We conclude that, whereas depleted dictators neglect fairness motives from the very first decision on, nondepleted dictators initially resist the tendency to act selfishly, but eventually become depleted or learn to act selfishly. Hence, pro-social behavior may be short-lived, and ego depletion uncovers the default tendencies for selfishness earlier.