A little help
The Price of Being Beautiful: Negative Effects of Attractiveness on Empathy for Children in Need
Robert Fisher & Yu Ma
Journal of Consumer Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
The research examines how the attractiveness of children in need affects the empathy they evoke and the subsequent help they receive from unrelated adults. We find that attractive children are attributed desirable characteristics related to social competence, which is consistent with the beautiful is good stereotype. Ironically, we find that these attributions reduce the empathy evoked by attractive children and the help they receive from unrelated adults as long as their need is not severe. We demonstrate these effects in four experiments. The research identifies a significant cost of being beautiful and an important exception to the beautiful is good stereotype. The results also have practical implications for how children are portrayed in promotional materials for disaster relief agencies, children’s hospitals, and other charities.
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Social Heterogeneity and Volunteering in U.S. Cities
Thomas Rotolo & John Wilson
Sociological Forum, June 2014, Pages 429–452
Abstract:
In this research we explore the relationship between social heterogeneity and volunteering across U.S. metropolitan areas testing a theory that race heterogeneity, racial segregation, and income inequality are negatively associated with the rate of volunteering. Theorizing that social heterogeneity will have different effects for religious and secular volunteering rates, we analyze them separately. We use nonlinear multilevel models to analyze nearly 200,000 individuals across 248 cities, controlling for nonprofits per capita, religious congregations per capita, proportion of the population with college degrees, and the family poverty rate. While much of the intercity variation in volunteering is due to the composition of the population living in each city, we find general support for the predicted negative effect of social heterogeneity on volunteering. However, the effects vary by volunteering type. Race heterogeneity is negatively related only to secular volunteering, racial segregation is negatively related to both general volunteering and secular volunteering, and income inequality is negatively related to all types of volunteering.
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The Chicago Fire of 1871: A bottom-up approach to disaster relief
Emily Skarbek
Public Choice, July 2014, Pages 155-180
Abstract:
Can bottom-up relief efforts lead to recovery after disasters? Conventional wisdom and contemporary public policy suggest that major crises require centralized authority to provide disaster relief goods. Using a novel set of comprehensive donation and expenditure data collected from archival records, this paper examines a bottom-up relief effort following one of the most devastating natural disasters of the nineteenth century: the Chicago Fire of 1871. Findings show that while there was no central government relief agency present, individuals, businesses, corporate entities and municipal governments were able to finance the relief effort though donations. The Chicago Relief and Aid Society, a voluntary association of agents with a stake in relief outcomes, leveraged organizational assets and constitutional rules to administer aid.
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A Field Experiment on Directed Giving at a Public University
Catherine Eckel, David Herberich & Jonathan Meer
NBER Working Paper, May 2014
Abstract:
The use of directed giving - allowing donors to target their gifts to specific organizations or functions - is pervasive in fundraising, yet little is known about its effectiveness. We conduct a field experiment at a public university in which prospective donors are presented with either an opportunity to donate to the unrestricted Annual Fund, or an opportunity of donating to the Annual Fund and directing some or all of their donation towards the academic college from which they graduated. While there is no effect on the probability of giving, donations are significantly larger when there is the option of directing. However, the value of the option does not come directly from use, as very few donors choose to direct their gift.
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An Upward Spiral Between Gratitude and Humility
Elliott Kruse et al.
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
In two experiments and one diary study, we examined the relationship between self- and other-oriented processes by considering how gratitude can influence humility and vice versa. Humility is characterized by low self-focus, secure sense of self, and increased valuation of others. Gratitude is marked by a sense that one has benefited from the actions of another. In the first experiment, participants who wrote a gratitude letter showed higher state humility than those who performed a neutral activity. In the second experiment, baseline state humility predicted the amount of gratitude felt after writing a gratitude letter compared to a neutral activity. Finally, in a 14-day diary study, humility and gratitude mutually predicted one another, even after controlling for the other’s prior level. Our results suggest that humility and gratitude are mutually reinforcing.
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Be Fair, Your Employees Are Watching: A Relational Response Model of External Third-Party Justice
Benjamin Dunford et al.
Personnel Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
There is growing theoretical recognition in the organizational justice literature that an organization's treatment of external parties (such as patients, community members, customers, and the general public) shapes its own employees’ attitudes and behavior toward it. However, the emerging third-party justice literature has an inward focus, emphasizing perceptions of the treatment of other insiders (e.g., co-workers or team members). This inward focus overlooks meaningful “outward” employee concerns relating to how organizations treat external parties. We propose a relational response model to advance the third-party justice literature asserting that the organization's fair treatment of external parties sends important relational signals to employees that shape their social exchange perceptions toward their employer. Supporting this proposition, in two multi-source studies in separate healthcare organizations we found that patient-directed justice had indirect effects on supervisory cooperative behavior ratings through organizational trust and organizational identification.
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Paying it forward: How helping others can reduce the psychological threat of receiving help
Katherina Alvarez & Esther van Leeuwen
Journal of Applied Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper shows that receiving help could be psychologically harmful for recipients, and passing on help to others after receiving help (“helping forward”) is a good strategy to improve and restore help recipients' self-competence. Participants (N = 87) received autonomy- or dependency-oriented help and anticipated helping forward or not. Compared to receiving autonomy-oriented help, receiving dependency-oriented help negatively affected participants' self-competence and their evaluation of the helper. Anticipation of future helping increased the liking for and evaluation of the helper. After paying help forward, participants felt more self-competent than before helping, and this effect was more pronounced among former recipients of dependency-oriented help. These results show that helping forward can negate the psychological threat associated with receiving help.
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Unofficial Development Assistance: A Model of Development Charities’ Donation Income
Wiji Arulampalam, Peter Backus & John Micklewright
Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, forthcoming
Abstract:
The empirical literature on the determinants of charities’ donation income, distinguishing the charitable cause, is small. We consider the case of development charities specifically. Using a panel covering a quarter of a century, we observe a strong fundraising effect and a unitary household income elasticity. We find evidence that the conventionally identified ‘price’ effect may simply be the product of omitted variable bias. Our results further suggest that public spending on development crowds in private donations for development. We find a positive spillover effect of fundraising, suggesting the efforts of one development charity may increase contributions to other development charities.
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Sweetened blood sweetens behavior: Ego depletion, glucose, guilt, and prosocial behavior
Hanyi Xu et al.
Appetite, October 2014, Pages 8–11
Abstract:
Although guilt feels bad to the individual, it is good for society because guilty feelings can prompt people to perform good deeds. Previous research shows that fatigue decreases guilty feelings and helpful behavior. This present research tests whether glucose restores guilty feelings and increases helpful behavior. Depleted participants watched a movie about butchering animals for their meat or skin and were told to express no emotions, whereas non-depleted participants watched the same movie, but could express their emotions. Afterwards they drank a glucose or placebo beverage. Having participants play a game in which another person was punished for their errors induced guilt. Finally, participants played a dictator game in which they could leave lottery tickets for the next participant. Depleted participants felt less guilty and helped less than non-depleted participants, and those who consumed a placebo beverage felt less guilt and helped less than those who consumed a glucose beverage.
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Helping the self help others: Self-affirmation increases self-compassion and pro-social behaviors
Emily Lindsay & David Creswell
Frontiers in Psychology, May 2014
Abstract:
Reflecting on an important personal value in a self-affirmation activity has been shown to improve psychological functioning in a broad range of studies, but the underlying mechanisms for these self-affirmation effects are unknown. Here we provide an initial test of a novel self-compassion account of self-affirmation in two experimental studies. Study 1 shows that an experimental manipulation of self-affirmation (3-min of writing about an important personal value vs. writing about an unimportant value) increases feelings of self-compassion, and these feelings in turn mobilize more pro-social behaviors to a laboratory shelf-collapse incident. Study 2 tests and extends these effects by evaluating whether self-affirmation increases feelings of compassion toward the self (consistent with the self-compassion account) or increases feelings of compassion toward others (an alternative other-directed compassion account), using a validated storytelling behavioral task. Consistent with a self-compassion account, Study 2 demonstrates the predicted self-affirmation by video condition interaction, indicating that self-affirmation participants had greater feelings of self-compassion in response to watching their own storytelling performance (self-compassion) compared to watching a peer’s storytelling performance (other-directed compassion). Further, pre-existing levels of trait self-compassion moderated this effect, such that self-affirmation increased self-compassionate responses the most in participants low in trait self-compassion. This work suggests that self-compassion may be a promising mechanism for self-affirmation effects, and that self-compassionate feelings can mobilize pro-social behaviors.