To the rescue
Getting the Most out of Giving: Concretely Framing a Prosocial Goal Maximizes Happiness
Melanie Rudd, Jennifer Aaker & Michael Norton
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Across six field and laboratory experiments, participants assigned a more concretely-framed prosocial goal (e.g., making someone smile or increasing recycling) felt happier and reported creating greater personal happiness after performing a goal-directed act of kindness than did those who were assigned a functionally similar, but more abstractly-framed, prosocial goal (e.g., making someone happy or saving the environment). Moreover, mediation analyses revealed that this effect was driven by differences in the size of the gap between participants’ expectations and reality. Compared to those who pursued an abstractly-framed prosocial goal, those who pursued a concretely-framed goal perceived that the actual outcome of their goal-directed efforts more accurately matched their expectations, causing them to experience a greater boost in happiness. Evidence that participants are unable to predict this effect, believing that pursuing abstractly-framed prosocial goals would have either an equal or greater positive impact on their own happiness, is also presented.
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“Helping” Versus “Being a Helper”: Invoking the Self to Increase Helping in Young Children
Christopher Bryan, Allison Master & Gregory Walton
Child Development, forthcoming
Abstract:
Can a subtle linguistic cue that invokes the self motivate children to help? In two experiments, 3- to 6-year-old children (N = 149) were exposed to the idea of “being a helper” (noun condition) or “helping” (verb condition). Noun wording fosters the perception that a behavior reflects an identity — the kind of person one is. Both when children interacted with an adult who referenced “being a helper” or “helping” (Experiment 1) and with a new adult (Experiment 2), children in the noun condition helped significantly more across four tasks than children in the verb condition or a baseline control condition. The results demonstrate that children are motivated to pursue a positive identity. Moreover, this motivation can be leveraged to encourage prosocial behavior.
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Steven Yen & Ernest Zampelli
Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, June 2014, Pages 58–67
Abstract:
We use data from the first wave of the Panel Study on American Religion and Ethnicity to estimate a multivariate sample selection model of charitable giving of time and money highlighting the roles of political ideology, religiosity, political and social involvement, and diversity in personal relationships while controlling for other factors commonly identified in the scholarly work on philanthropic behavior. Our findings provide no evidence that political conservatives are more charitable than political liberals as advanced by Brooks (2006). To the contrary, our results suggest that at least in terms of volunteering, political conservatives are less charitable than political liberals. We also find evidence that the adverse impacts of political conservatism on charitable behavior are exacerbated by the increasing importance of religion/religious faith in one's life. These results, together with robust findings of significant and positive independent effects of other participation, involvement, and diversity variables, imply that charitable actions are both practice-driven and ideology-driven and somewhat at odds with the findings of Vaidyanathan et al. (2011).
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Yohanes Riyanto & Jianlin Zhang
Economic Inquiry, forthcoming
Abstract:
In a meritocratic system, people are compensated on the basis of their individual ability, whereas in an egalitarian system people are equally compensated. Essentially, in the latter system high performers are taxed and subsidize underperformers. Would differences in income redistribution procedures affect people's pro-social behavior? In experiments, we found that people are more generous toward strangers in an egalitarian treatment than in a meritocratic treatment. Interestingly, being taxed does not reduce the generosity of high performers, whereas being subsidized significantly increases the generosity of low performers.
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When do victim group members feel a moral obligation to help suffering others?
Ruth Warner, Michael Wohl & Nyla Branscombe
European Journal of Social Psychology, April 2014, Pages 231–241
Abstract:
In four experiments, we assessed when the salience of ingroup historical victimization will encourage a sense of moral obligation to reduce the suffering of others. Historically victimized groups (Jews and women; Experiments 1 and 3) who considered the lessons of the past for their ingroup felt heightened moral obligation to help other non-adversary victimized groups. However, when the suffering outgroup was an adversary, Jews (Experiment 2) and women (Experiment 4) who focused on the lesson of historical victimization for their ingroup reported lower moral obligation to reduce others' suffering. The lesson focus effect on moral obligation was mediated by benefit finding as well as perceived similarity to the outgroup. Means to facilitate moral obligation, as well as limiting factors, among victimized group members are discussed.
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Religious involvement, helping others, and psychological well-being
Neal Krause & David Hayward
Mental Health, Religion & Culture, Summer 2014, Pages 629-640
Abstract:
This study has two goals. The first goal is to see if involvement in religion is associated with providing tangible support to family members and strangers. The second goal is to see if providing tangible support to family members and strangers is associated with well-being. A conceptual model, which was developed to address these issues, contains the following core relationships: (1) individuals who go to church more often will receive more spiritual support from coreligionists; (2) those who receive more spiritual support will provide more tangible assistance to family members and strangers; and (3) people who help family members and strangers will report greater life satisfaction and higher self-esteem. Findings from a nationwide survey support all but one of these relationships. More specifically, the results suggest that providing tangible support to family members is associated with greater well-being, but providing tangible support to strangers is not associated with well-being.
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Increasing Fundraising Success by Decreasing Donor Choice
Stefano Barbieri & David Malueg
Journal of Public Economic Theory, June 2014, Pages 372–400
Abstract:
Suggested contributions, membership categories, and discrete, incremental thank you gifts are devices often used by benevolent associations that provide public goods. Such devices focus donations at discrete levels, thereby effectively limiting the donors' freedom to give. We study the effects on overall donations of the trade-off between rigid schemes that severely restrict the choices of contribution on the one hand, and flexible membership contracts on the other, taking into account the strategic response of contributors whose values for the public good are private information. We show flexibility dominates when (i) the dispersion of donors' taste for the public good increases, (ii) the number of potential donors increases, and (iii) there is greater funding by an external authority. Our theoretical results are consistent with three basic patterns we discover in the membership schemes of National Public Radio stations: stations offer a larger number of suggested contribution levels — a proxy for flexibility — as (i) the incomes of the population served become more diverse, (ii) the population of the coverage area increases, and (iii) there is greater external support from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
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Dean Karlan & Daniel Wood
NBER Working Paper, April 2014
Abstract:
We test how donors respond to new information about a charity’s effectiveness. Freedom from Hunger implemented a test of its direct marketing solicitations, varying letters by whether they include a discussion of their program’s impact as measured by scientific research. The base script, used for both treatment and control, included a standard qualitative story about an individual beneficiary. Adding scientific impact information has no effect on whether someone donates, or how much, in the full sample. However, we find that amongst recent prior donors (those we posit more likely to open the mail and thus notice the treatment), large prior donors increase the likelihood of giving in response to information on aid effectiveness, whereas small prior donors decrease their giving. We motivate the analysis and experiment with a theoretical model that highlights two predictions. First, larger gift amounts, holding education and income constant, is a proxy for altruism giving (as it is associated with giving more to fewer charities) versus warm glow giving (giving less to more charities). Second, those motivated by altruism will respond positively to appeals based on evidence, whereas those motivated by warm glow may respond negatively to appeals based on evidence as it turns off the emotional trigger for giving, or highlights uncertainty in aid effectiveness.
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Contingent Match Incentives Increase Donations
Lalin Anik, Michael Norton & Dan Ariely
Journal of Marketing Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
We propose a new means by which non-profits can induce donors to give today and commit to giving in the future: contingent match incentives, in which matching is made contingent on the percentage of others who give (e.g., “if X% of others give, we will match all donations”). A field experiment shows that a 75% contingent match (where matches “kick in” only if 75% of others donate) is most effective in increasing commitment to recurring donations. An online experiment reveals that the 75% contingent match drives commitment to recurring donations because it simultaneously provides social proof yet offers a low enough target that it remains plausible that the match will occur. A final online experiment demonstrates that the effectiveness of the 75% contingent match extends to one-time donations. We discuss the practical and theoretical implications of contingent matches for managers and academics.
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Thomas Allison et al.
Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, forthcoming
Abstract:
Microloans garnered from crowdfunding provide an important source of financial capital for nascent entrepreneurs. Drawing on cognitive evaluation theory, we assess how linguistic cues known to affect underlying motivation can frame entrepreneurial narratives either as a business opportunity or as an opportunity to help others. We examine how this framing affects fundraising outcomes in the context of prosocial lending and conduct our analysis on a sample of microloans made to over 36,000 entrepreneurs in 51 countries via an online crowdfunding platform. We find that lenders respond positively to narratives highlighting the venture as an opportunity to help others, and less positively when the narrative is framed as a business opportunity.
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Effect of Hair Ornamentation on Helping
Jordy Stefan & Nicolas Guéguen
Psychological Reports, April 2014, Pages 491-495
Abstract:
Previous research has found that restaurant waitresses wearing flowers in their hair received higher tips. Here, the effect of hair ornamentation on responses to an explicit request for help was assessed. Two female confederates wearing a barrette with or without a flower asked 240 passersby (120 men, 120 women; apparently 30 to 40 years of age) in the street for bus fare change. The success rate was 76.7% when they wore the ornamentation and only 50.8% without the ornamentation. Both men and women more readily helped those with the hair ornamentation.
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Intranasal administration of oxytocin increases compassion toward women
Sharon Palgi, Ehud Klein & Simone Shamay-Tsoory
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, forthcoming
Abstract:
It has been suggested that the degree of compassion — the feeling of warmth, understanding and kindness that motivates the desire to help others, is modulated by observers’ views regarding the target’s vulnerability and suffering. This study tested the hypothesis that as compassion developed to protect vulnerable kinships, hormones such as oxytocin, which have been suggested as playing a key role in ‘tend-and-befriend’ behaviors among women, will enhance compassion toward women but not toward men. Thirty subjects participated in a double-blind, placebo-controlled, within-subject study. Following administration of oxytocin/placebo, participants listened to recordings of different female/male protagonists describing distressful emotional conflicts and were then asked to provide compassionate advice to the protagonist. The participants’ responses were coded according to various components of compassion by two clinical psychologists who were blind to the treatment. The results showed that in women and men participants oxytocin enhanced compassion toward women, but did not affect compassion toward men. These findings indicate that the oxytocinergic system differentially mediates compassion toward women and toward men, emphasizing an evolutionary perspective that views compassion as a caregiving behavior designed to help vulnerable individuals.