No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
Sympathy and Callousness: The Impact of Deliberative Thought on Donations to Identifiable And Statistical Victims
Abstract
When donating to charitable causes, people do not value lives consistently. Money is often concentrated on a single victim even though more people would be helped, if resources were dispersed or spent protecting future victims. We examine the impact of deliberating about donation decisions on generosity. In a series of field experiments, we show that teaching or priming people to recognize the discrepancy in giving toward identifiable and statistical victims has perverse effects: individuals give less to identifiable victims but do not increase giving to statistical victims, resulting in an overall reduction in caring and giving. Thus, it appears that, when thinking deliberatively, people discount sympathy towards identifiable victims but fail to generate sympathy toward statistical victims.
... The IVE refers to the increased willingness to help when the recipient is an identified victim (e.g., the boy Aylan) compared to an unidentified recipient or statistical victims (e.g., thousands or millions of people affected by war; Genevsky et al., 2013;Jenni & Loewenstein, 1997;Kogut & Ritov, 2005a, 2005b. Increased willingness to help an identified victim can both relate to more people being willing to help (e.g., more positive to help or more likely to donate some amount; Erlandsson, 2021;Genevsky et al., 2013;Small & Loewenstein, 2003) and that the donated amount to the identified victim is higher than to the unidentified victim(s) (e.g., Kogut & Ritov, 2005a;Small et al., 2007). An example of how to test the IVE is by comparing a charity appeal that depicts one identified child with a charity appeal that depicts one unidentified child (as done by Genevsky et al., 2013). ...
... Thus, these findings support the idea that people rely on their feelings when making donation decisions related to identifiability, a kind of affect heuristic . However, Friedrich and McGuire (2010) did not find support for the affect-mediated explanation of the IVE -possibly because they used five items aggregated to a scale of "feelings" taken from Small et al. (2007), rather than specifically measuring sympathy or distress. Instead, the authors discuss proportion dominance as a possible mechanism. ...
... Another boundary condition can relate to differences in operationalization. In previous studies on the IVE, some have compared the donations between a single identified victim and a single unidentified victim (e.g., Genevsky et al., 2013;Kogut & Ritov, 2005a;2005b), whereas others have compared donations to a single identified victim and a large group of statistical victims (e.g., study 4 in Erlandsson et al., 2015;Hart et al., 2018;Small et al., 2007) and still others have compared donations to a specific, generally described cause (with no mentioning of number of victims) and an identified victim (the identified person is sometimes described along with the specified cause; e.g., Ein-Gar & Levontin, 2013;study IVE in Erlandsson et al., 2015; study 1 in Kogut et al., 2018). The studies investigating the IVE in this thesis have mainly focused on the latter operationalization. ...
... Currently, there are rising levels of forced displacement of people globally and not enough funds or assistance to sufficiently aid in the humanitarian crisis, according to the global humanitarian assistance report in 2021. While scholars have researched the ways in which message framing can impact monetary donations [1][2][3][4][5][6][7], less research has investigated the ways to increase an alternate form of assistance: donating time. ...
... Since there has been comprehensive literature on monetary donation for people and natural environment [3][4][5][6]14], this study examines the influence of type of message on time donation based on the compassion fade framework. Specifically, when confronted with one child who suffers from starvation, individuals often move their hearts and help the child with their donation [3]. ...
... While the global humanitarian crisis continues to receive attention [34], research has asked how message framing can impact people's monetary donations [1][2][3][5][6][7], yet less research has asked how appeals can be adapted to garner volunteers to donate their time instead of their money. Volunteer tourism or "voluntourism" is the act of people traveling to other countries to donate their time to help the community. ...
This study investigated the relationship between the type of volunteer tourism (human vs. flora vs. fauna) and the type of message (individual with no statistic vs. individual with small statistic vs. individual with large statistic) and potential tourists’ attitudes towards volunteer tourism and their intention to donate their time. To do so, this study conducted a between-subject 3 × 3 factorial design online experiment, where the influences of compassion fade on attitudes and behavioral intention to donate time for volunteer tourism, along with the impacts of positive affect, emotional involvement, and credibility, were examined. The results of the current study revealed that type of volunteer tourism and type of message do not affect attitude towards volunteer tourism and attitude towards the ad. Further analysis indicated that, among all three mediating variables, only positive affect mediated the relationship between type of volunteer tourism and attitude towards volunteer tourism, and all other hypotheses were not statistically significant. Moreover, the results indicated that there is a positive relationship between perceived ad credibility and attitude towards the ad, and also between perceived ad credibility and attitude towards volunteer tourism. The implications of these results are discussed based on the empirical findings.
... Studies have found that people have different psychological and behavioral responses toward single and numerous people who need help (Slovic, 2010). Specifically, people had more emotional experiences with the individual in need and were inclined to help a single individual in need than group in need (Kogut and Ritov, 2005;Small et al., 2007). Given the difference between the individual and group in need, it is necessary to examine self-other decision-making from a group perspective. ...
... Meanwhile, Liu et al. (2020) found that empathic concern only moderated the FRN response and that the valence effect of the FRN was as strong for the stranger outcome in the high-empathy condition (i.e., the stranger-in-need condition) as it was for self-outcome. However, researches have found that people generate relatively less empathy for group in need than the individual in need (Small et al., 2007;Erlandsson et al., 2015). We expected that self-outcome had a larger valence effect on the FRN than the charity outcome. ...
Previous studies have examined the outcome evaluation related to the self and other, and recent research has explored the outcome evaluation of the self and other with pro-social implications. However, the evaluation processing of outcomes in the group in need remains unclear. This study has examined the neural mechanisms of evaluative processing by gambling for the self and charity, respectively. At the behavioral level, when participants make decisions for themselves, they made riskier decisions following the gain than loss in small outcomes and engage in more risky behaviors following the loss than gain in large outcomes. However, magnitude and valence did not affect the next risky behavior when participants made decisions for the charity. At the neurophysiological level, the results found that the FRN was larger for the charity outcome than for the self-outcome. For FRN, the valence difference of small outcomes was smaller than that of large outcomes. The P3 response was larger for the self-outcome than for the charity outcome. Meanwhile, compared with the small outcome, the self-charity discrepancies have a significant difference in large outcomes. In addition, the FRN amplitude for self in large outcomes was negatively correlated with the upcoming risky choices, regardless of outcome valence. The behavioral results suggest that people are more likely to optimize strategies for themselves than for the charity. The ERP findings indicated that people focus more on charity outcome than self-outcome in the early stage. In the middle and late stages, people turn attention to their outcomes, and the difference between self’s and charity’s outcome varies with the magnitude. Specifically, it is only in large outcomes that people engage more emotional attention or motivation in their outcomes, but self and charity outcomes had a similar emotional engagement in small outcomes.
... Empathy may be suppressed by analytical thinking (Cech, 2014;Jack et al., 2013;Small et al., 2007). Thus, Walther et al. (2017) argue for explicit training in empathic thinking within engineering education. ...
For engineers who aim to address sustainability challenges, participating in transdisciplinary teams is key. Yet developing transdisciplinary knowledge, including systems thinking, metacognition, and empathic thinking, is not well supported in traditional engineering programs. The extent to which selected learning activities in the introduction to engineering courses support student development of systems thinking, metacognition, and empathic thinking is investigated. Focus group discussions with instructional teams and student interviews are examined to elucidate how course activities improved student transdisciplinary knowledge. Threshold concepts frame the qualitative analysis of the collected data. Implications for teaching and learning are discussed. Results suggest the investigated learning activities support student development of transdisciplinary knowledge as indicated by changes in systems thinking, metacognition, and empathic thinking. Where prior quantitative exploratory studies revealed little change in transdisciplinary knowledge indicators pre‐ and post‐course, deeper qualitative analysis uncovers students manifested improvements in transdisciplinary knowledge indicators as narrated by the students themselves and as observed by instructors and teaching assistants. Integrating transdisciplinary knowledge development into engineering programs, starting with appropriate learning activities in first‐year engineering courses, may provide new pathways for transforming curricula aimed at educating the 21st‐century engineer.
... For example, it has been argued that studies investigating biases in empathy are actually biases in compassion. Self-report and psychophysiological data indicate that people's bias toward an identifiable victim (Small et al., 2007b) and single individuals (Västfjäll et al., 2014) are not driven by empathy but rather a loss of compassion (Västfjäll et al., 2014(Västfjäll et al., , 2017. ...
... Additionally, the study researched how sympathetic emotions towards a charitable cause might strengthen the willingness to donate. The so called victim effect, which argues that people are more willing to donate, when they feel pity for individuals, is an important factor to consider, when it comes to motivations behind donations (Cryder et al., 2013;Dickert and Slovic, 2013;Small et al., 2007). Nevertheless, other research found that the feeling of being inspired also contributes to more donations. ...
Citizen participation is a democratic practice that became, especially on a local level, an important mean for the public to be included in the development of their immediate surrounding. With the digitalization of work and social life also the digitalization of the public sector, including governmental action, began. This process, as a research discipline called digital government, includes addressing how the interaction between citizens and their state should be designed. A meaningful way to do so are digital platforms that enable participation in governmental action. Digital Citizen Participation, a concept introduced in this dissertation, tries to include recent technological innovations in e-Participation platform design. This dissertation argues that these innovations might help overcome general barriers in participation processes. When it comes to construction projects in urban environments for example, public debates and protests may arise if architectural plans remain unshared or are not sufficiently accessible for the citizens they might affect. To involve the public affected by urban planning, offering easily graspable visualizations for citizens is key. This dissertation deals with the participation of citizens in urban planning through an e-Participation platform that makes use of immersive technologies such as Augmented and Virtual Reality. In this work, this idea is investigated through a design science research approach that uses qualitative and quantitative methods. While the first qualitative study puts for-ward a set of meta-requirements and design principles based on interviews with 27 individuals, the second study (n=339) and third study (n=382) evaluate quantitatively a prototype based on those design principles. The used methods are adequately contex-tualized and, in the end, a final prototype of the platform is demonstrated. This allows to show findings concerning the forms and levels of participation citizens and initiators are interested in when using immersive systems for public participation, and how an ideal platform should be designed. Among many other findings, the studies show that citizens have a high interest in using immersive systems for public participation and find their qualities for visualization to be highly valuable.
... Perhaps some of the best examples of the effect are associated with efforts by charities to solicit funds from individual donors (Small et al., 2007). Eliciting an emotional response from potential donors tends to increase the likelihood they will take action (i.e. ...
There is considerable evidence that 'active learning' strategies are more efficacious than traditional 'passive learning' methods (e.g. lecture). Presented here is a small group active learning project developed for undergraduate social psychology students. The activity involves carrying out and reporting the results of a structured demonstration of the identifiable victim effect. The project provides students with the opportunity to write a research proposal, collect data, perform a basic analysis and interpretation of the data, and report their findings in written form. Student feedback on the project has been positive overall. The project seems to be particularly beneficial in helping students to understand and appreciate the research process.
... In this study, PBL is adapted adding the contributions made by neuroscience to learn from narratives (Cable et al., 2013;Rizzolatti et al., 1996;Small et al., 2007;Stephens et al., 2010;Zak, 2015). The adaptations to the original method result in a new variant of PBL, which we have named Narrative-Based Learning (NBL). ...
Purpose
The aim of this paper is to explore whether the use of an active learning methodology implemented through a mobile phone can help future teachers to develop more effective reading promotion activities than those based on traditional learning methodologies.
Design/methodology/approach
A study was conducted based on the comparison of perceptions of two groups of teacher training students. The experimental group was trained in an active methodology to promote reading on mobile phones, whilst the control group was trained in a classical methodology also using the same devices. Variables were observed using a self-administered questionnaire, and the scores obtained were analysed from their descriptive statistics of the comparison of means of Kruskal–Wallis H test.
Findings
The results showed that students perceived significant improvements associated with active learning methodology. The variables with the most remarkable results were those related to better use of the class, participation and satisfaction. However, the ubiquitous variable obtained the fewest differences, maybe because both learning methodologies were applied using mobile devices.
Originality/value
The conclusions of this study clearly suggest that combining active learning methodologies and the use of mobile phones to promote reading could lead to better results than applying traditional learning methodologies. The value of this study paves the way for future research to move forward in the discovery of effective teaching strategies based on active methods and mobile devices.
... This work also paves the way for understanding when people see malevolently creative ideas as actionable. Consistent with the identifiable victim effect (Lee & Feeley, 2016;Small, Loewenstein, & Slovic, 2007), we find that the way in which people view their opponents may inform the likelihood that they adopt strategies for enacting harm. More specifically, our research shows that the extent thatcompetitors personify their opponents may be indicative of theirmotivation to mobilize toward aggression and use new andunexpected attack strategies. ...
Research on malevolent creativity has rarely linked the generation of harmful ideas with their implementation (i.e., malevolent innovation). To explain why people might act upon their malevolently creative ideas, we drew on affective events theory. Specifically, given evidence that aggressive and creative thought events can elicit positive emotions, we argued that generating new and harmful ideas can evoke positive emotional states that make malevolent innovation a more desirable course of action. We first tested our mediational pathway in two studies with different malevolent creativity tasks. Finding only partial support for our predictions in Study 1 (N = 126), but full support in Study 2 (N = 296), we reflected on our study tasks and suspected that our mixed results may have occurred because the target of ideas in Study 2 embodied more human qualities than in Study 1. Thus, we integrated theory on target personification to see if assigning personhood to a target moderated the malevolent creativity-innovation pathway. We tested our updated model in Study 3 (N = 214) and found that the indirect effect of malevolent creativity on the desire to implement ideas (through positive emotions) was indeed conditional upon individuals’ personification of a target.
... One notion of this research is that reasonbased decision making can be determined from donating more money to more animals in need. Research on the identifiable victim effect, however, highlights that this might not be how people act when donating money (Small et al., 2007;Small & Loewenstein, 2003). Small and colleagues (2007), for example, showed that participants would donate more money when seeing one child in need, whereas learning about statistics and the overall need resulted in smaller donations. ...
When individuals cannot make up their mind, they sometimes use a random decision-making aid such as a coin to make a decision. This aid may also elicit affective reactions: A person flipping a coin may (dis)like the outcome, and thus decide according to this feeling. We refer to this process as catalysing decisions and to the aid as catalyst. We investigate whether using a catalyst may not only elicit affect but also result in more affect-based decision making. We used different online studies that examine affect-driven decisions by investigating scope insensitivity (indirect behavioural measure) and self-reported weight given to feelings versus reasons in hypothetical donation decisions. Study 1a showed that a catalyst (a lottery wheel) lead to more scope insensitive (i.e. affect-driven) donations. Study 1b included several changes and did not replicate these results. Study 2 (preregistered) examined scope insensitivity but did not replicate previous results; Study 3 (preregistered) looked at the weight given to feelings versus reason. Although catalyst (compared to control) participants descriptively reported relying more on feelings, this difference did not reach significance. In contrast to lay beliefs, results do not indicate support for the hypothesis that using a catalyst results in more affect-based hypothetical donation decisions.
... Research has identified various driving factors in charitable giving decisions, for example, the neediness of the recipient (Kogut and Ritov, 2005), identifiability of the donor (Small et al., 2007;Lee and Feeley, 2016), or personality characteristics of the donor such as social value orientation (Van Lange et al., 2007). ...
Providing potential donors with information about the behavior of others (i.e., social information) is an increasingly used strategy to nudge prosocial decision-making. In the present study, we investigated the effect of ingroup vs. outgroup information on participants' charity preferences by applying a Drift Diffusion Model (DDM) approach. In a joint evaluation scenario, we manipulated different levels of ingroup/outgroup preference ratios for two charities within subjects. Every subject was presented with three stimulus types (i.e., high, medium, and low ingroup ratio) randomized in 294 trials divided into six blocks. We expected that for stimuli with a high ingroup/outgroup ratio, participants should more often and faster decide for the ingroup's most favored charity. We expected that the speed of evidence accumulation will be higher the larger the ingroup/outgroup ratio. Additionally, we investigated whether variations in model parameters can explain individual differences in participants' behaviors. Our results showed that people generally followed ingroup members' preferences when deciding for a charity. However, on finding an unexpected pattern in our results, we conducted post-hoc analyses which revealed two different behavioral strategies used by participants. Based on participants' decisions, we classified them into “equality driven” individuals who preferred stimuli with the least difference between ingroup and outgroup percentages or “ingroup driven” individuals who favored stimuli with the highest ingroup/outgroup ratio. Results are discussed in line with relevant literature, and implications for practitioners are given.
In partnership with a sport-based Experiential Philanthropy Intervention – The Play Better Program – we conducted a pre-registered, longitudinal experiment examining whether repeatedly reflecting on prosocial activity could boost adolescents’ objective generosity. Adolescents (N = 114; aged 9–16) practiced charitable giving throughout their 2-month sports season and were randomly assigned to repeatedly reflect on the importance of their prosocial activity (Reflection condition) or to write about their everyday activities (Control condition). Adolescents completed an objective measure of generosity at pre- and post-intervention and self-reported measures of prosocial character. Across conditions, adolescents donated objectively more at post- vs. pre-intervention. However, adolescents in the Reflection (vs. Control) condition were no more generous and did not report greater prosocial character at post-intervention. Overall, these findings highlight the malleability of human prosociality and the need for additional scholar-practitioner collaborations to uncover whether and how Experiential Philanthropy Interventions boost long-term generosity among the next generation of givers.
Regulatory decisions on environmental issues often entail comparing a proposed regulation’s benefits to its costs, usually presuming that the rule should be adopted only if benefits justify costs. Conventional benefits estimation usually defines benefits of a human-mortality-reducing regulation as the product of the number of lives expected to be prolonged and the “value of a statistical life,” usually estimated by averaging citizens’ responses when asked their willingness to pay for a specified small reduction in the probability of their own death. A novel approach to estimating life-prolonging benefits elicits stated preference tradeoffs between national benefits and national costs, a method more compatible with actual regulatory decisions (Finkel and Johnson Environ Law 48:453–476, 2018). All national-tradeoff studies to date presented subjects with only one magnitude, thus not testing within-person scope sensitivity. A U.S. experiment (n = 600) presented ascending or descending sequences of national regulatory benefits (a hypothetical regulation prolongs 10, 100, or 1000 lives) or national regulatory costs ($100 million, $1 billion, or $10 billion). The former yielded decreasing, the latter increasing, values per life when magnitudes increased, without within-frame order effects. Willingness to trade off benefits and costs generally rose or fell less than tenfold overall with a tenfold benefit/cost change, although strict proportionality and super-proportionality also occurred in various sub-groups. Averaged across frames, the implicit value per life prolonged increased with regulatory initiative size, contradicting the premise of invariant life value. Trimmed results mostly matched values of a statistical life used by U.S. federal regulatory agencies. This novel method could expand regulators’ benefit-valuing repertoire.
Maintaining a good reputation is crucial for humans. Altruism, e.g. charity, may serve as a costly signal that enhances reputation based on the real or communicated cost. Fundraising via charity running triggers competitive altruism when potential donors donate in reaction to the reputation increase of the fundraiser. Using real-life data of marathonists and half-marathonists (388 runners) and their 9281 donors, the present research focuses on how the communicated cost and goal of a charity run affected the potential donors. We analysed the introductory texts of the runners presented online according to the cost and the social benefit of the fundraising communicated by them. We have shown that emphasizing more the subjective cost of running and the social benefit of the goal, or writing a longer text, attracted more donors and, even though the average amount of donation per donor did not increase, still lead to a greater amount of donations collected overall by the fundraiser. It was also shown that a higher communicated subjective cost resulted in a higher ratio of opposite-sex donors, both in the case of male and female runners, suggesting that the communication of the cost of an altruistic act might be the object of sexual selection.
Significance statement
A good reputation is crucial for humans, as a reputable person enjoys several benefits. One way to maintain a good reputation is to be altruistic, e.g. doing charity. A seemingly high cost and a socially accepted goal may result in a higher reputation. Using data from a charity running community we demonstrate that fundraisers who emphasize their subjective cost (how difficult to run), and emphasize the good goal of the charity, attract more donors, and even though the average amount of each donation does not increase, a higher number of donors results in a greater amount of donations collected overall. Talking about the difficulties of the charity run results in a higher ratio of opposite-sex donors. Our results may be helpful to plan more successful charity events or to make a human community more altruistic and cooperative in general.
The most effective charities are hundreds of times more impactful than typical charities. However, most donors favor charities with personal/emotional appeal over effectiveness. We gave donors the option to split their donations between their personal favorite charity and an expert-recommended highly effective charity. This bundling technique increased donors’ impact without undermining their altruistic motivation, boosting effective donations by 76%. An additional boost of 55% was achieved by offering matching donations with increasing rates for allocating more to the highly effective charity. We show further that matching funds can be provided by donors focused on effectiveness through a self-sustaining process of micromatching. We applied these techniques in a new online donation platform ( GivingMultiplier.org ), which fundraised more than $1.5 million in its first 14 months. While prior applied research on altruism has focused on the quantity of giving, the present results demonstrate the value of focusing on the effectiveness of altruistic behavior.
In this article, a structure for how to craft persuasive stories is provided (i.e., the Narrative Policy Framework tenets of: establishing a plot, casting a set of characters, and highlighting a clear moral) and is integrated into a learning exercise/assignment outline alongside a sample evaluation tool. Possibilities to extend the learning exercise/assignment are also provided, including peer assessments of persuasiveness as well as reflecting on the experience of sharing persuasive stories with intended audiences. Also shared are teacher candidates’ testimonials on the value of the persuasive storytelling learning exercise/assignment for developing their capacity to effectively advocate for change within their current and future educational roles.
We describe the “evaluability bias”: the tendency to weight the importance of an attribute in proportion to its ease of evaluation. We propose that the evaluability bias influences decision making in the context of charitable giving: people tend to have a strong preference for charities with low overhead ratios (lower administrative expenses) but not for charities with high cost-effectiveness (greater number of saved lives per dollar), because the former attribute is easier to evaluate than the latter. In line with this hypothesis, we report the results of four studies showing that, when presented with a single charity, people are willing to donate more to a charity with low overhead ratio, regardless of cost-effectiveness. However, when people are presented with two charities simultaneously—thereby enabling comparative evaluation—they base their donation behavior on cost-effectiveness (Study 1). This suggests that people primarily value cost-effectiveness but manifest the evaluability bias in cases where they find it difficult to evaluate. However, people seem also to value a low overhead ratio for its own sake (Study 2). The evaluability bias effect applies to charities of different domains (Study 3). We also show that overhead ratio is easier to evaluate when its presentation format is a ratio, suggesting an inherent reference point that allows meaningful interpretation (Study 4).
We present evidence from a pre-registered experiment indicating that a philosophical argument – a type of rational appeal – can persuade people to make charitable donations. The rational appeal we used follows Singer’s “shallow pond” argument (1972), while incorporating an evolutionary debunking argument (Paxton, Ungar and Greene, 2012) against favoring nearby victims over distant ones. The effectiveness of this rational appeal did not differ significantly from that of a well-tested emotional appeal involving an image of a single child in need (Small, Loewenstein and Slovic, 2007). This is a surprising result, given evidence that emotions are the primary drivers of moral action, a view that has been very influential in the work of development organizations. We found no support for our hypothesis that combining our rational and emotional appeals would have a stronger effect than either appeal in isolation. However, our finding that both kinds of appeal can increase charitable donations is cause for optimism, especially concerning the potential efficacy of well-designed rational appeals. We consider the significance of these findings for moral psychology, ethics, and the work of organizations aiming to alleviate severe poverty.
When people donate, they rarely give to the charities that do the most good per dollar. Why is this? One possibility is that they do not know how to give effectively. Another possibility is that they are not motivated to do so. Across six tasks (Studies 1a, 1b), we found support for both explanations. Among lay donors, we observed multiple misconceptions—regarding disaster relief, overhead costs, donation splitting, and the relative effectiveness of local and foreign charities—that reduced the effectiveness of their giving. Similarly, we found that they were unfamiliar with the most effective charities (Studies 2a, 2b). Debunking these misconceptions and informing people about effectiveness boosted effective donations; however, a portion of lay donors continued to give ineffectively to satisfy their personal preferences. By contrast, a sample of self-identified effective altruists gave effectively across all tasks. They exhibited none of the misconceptions that we observed among lay donors and overwhelmingly favored the most effective option in their choice set (Study 3). Taken together, our studies imply that donors need to be both informed and motivated to give effectively on a consistent basis.
The majority of donations are dedicated to helping human recipients. Building on prior literature that demonstrates the role of downward social comparisons between donors and donation recipients in elevating willingness to help those in need, we propose that a maximizing mindset increases such downward social comparisons, which in turn promote donations to human recipients. A set of seven studies, including online and field experiments and a secondary dataset, provides convergent support for the effect of the maximizing mindset (whether measured as an inherent individual difference or activated as a temporary mindset) on donations and the mediating role of downward social comparisons. This research enriches the understanding of donations to human recipients by showing that donations can be enhanced by a maximizing mindset. Our findings offer important insights to donation-raising agencies. Specifically, activating the maximizing mindset among prospective donors—by embedding certain words in donation appeals or encouraging donors to think about their best choices in everyday life—could benefit charities and social-cause platforms in their efforts to raise donations to support the needy.
Helping decisions are susceptible to many biases—partly due to the helpers’ spontaneous emotional reactions to the appeal diverting their attention from the need to maximize the impact of their help. Attempts to overcome these biases by prompting deliberative thinking—namely, by asking participants to think deeply—have often been unsuccessful. Here, we propose a way of directing people’s attention to the most important aspects of their decisions, by asking them to rate the extent to which such attributes should be considered. In two experiments involving real-world crises, participants who underwent such structured analysis of their personal criteria were more likely to make decisions that maximized the number of lives saved. Moreover, their decisions were more in line with their personal values. We conclude that this method is a simple, efficient way of improving the quality of helping decisions in life-and-death situations.
Background:
Adherence to non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) for COVID-19, including physical distancing, masking, staying home while sick, and avoiding crowded indoor spaces remain critical for limiting the spread of COVID-19.
Objective:
This study tests the effectiveness of using various persuasive appeals (deontological moral frame, empathy, identifiable victim, goal proximity, and reciprocity) at improving intentions to adhere to prevention behaviors.
Methods:
A randomized online experiment using a representative sample of adult Canadian residents with respect to age, ethnicity, and province of residence was conducted between March 3-6, 2021. Participants indicated their intentions to follow public health guidelines, saw one of six flyers featuring a persuasive appeal or no appeal, then rated their intentions a second time. Known correlates of attitudes toward public health measures were also measured.
Results:
Intentions to adhere to public health measures increased in all appeal conditions. The message featuring an empathy appeal resulted in a greater increase in intentions than the control (no appeal) message. Moreover, the effectiveness of persuasive appeals was moderated by baseline intentions. Deontological, empathy, identifiable victim, and reciprocity appeals improved intentions more than the control message but only for people with lower baseline intentions to adhere to NPIs.
Conclusions:
Public health marketing campaigns aiming to increase adherence to COVID-19 protective behaviors could achieve modest gains by employing a range of persuasive appeals. To maximize impact, however, it is important that these campaigns be targeted to the right individuals.
Research questions in the prosocial behavior literature focus on the pro aspect of prosocial behavior—that is, how to motivate actions that benefit others. These questions typically employ simplified decision contexts that neglect the intersocial aspect of prosocial behavior—that is, people are embedded in social networks and impacted by interactivity among two or more persons, entities, or societies. These intersocial influences have increased with technology access. Consumers now face richer choice tradeoffs, can access more information on causes, observe others' actions, and choose to make their own choices public. To ask questions that address the nature of prosocial behavior itself rather than consider it merely as another decision context to motivate human behavior in, we call for researchers to conceptualize prosocial behavior as intersocial. This approach can help capture the more realistic decision tradeoffs consumers face, as well as illuminate new research opportunities arising from considering technology‐enabled giving and socially hyperconnected consumers.
Hurricanes, wildfires, pandemics, and other disasters have taken millions of lives in the past few years and caused substantial economic losses. To tackle these extraordinary circumstances, governments, organizations, and companies seek assistance from both humans and high‐technology machines such as robots. This research report documents how highlighting robots’ (vs. humans’) helping behaviors in disaster response can affect consumers’ prosociality, explores driving mechanisms, and tests solutions. Study 1 found that consumers donated fewer items of clothing after watching news highlighting robots’ (vs. humans’) assistance in a mudslide disaster. Featuring the COVID‐19 pandemic, Study 2 further showed that this decrease in prosociality occurred because reading about robots’ assistance felt less encouraging/inspiring to consumers. Studies 3A‐3C (and a supplemental study) explored multiple mechanisms and identified a key driver for the backfire effect—a lower perception of courage in disaster response robots. Accordingly, Study 4 tested three theory‐driven solutions to raise the perceived courage in robots to increase consumer prosociality.
The number of people donating to charities is declining at a time when technology is enabling a proliferation of new ways of offering support—from crowdfunding to hacking commercial platforms like AirBnB for novel purposes. There is a risk that charities could lose their traditional position as a trusted intermediary between individuals who want to help and people who need their support. This paper offers some suggestions as to why disintermediated giving may, in some situations, offer a more attractive donor experience than traditional charitable giving and suggests some possible areas for further study.
Nonprofit organizations often position their charitable efforts as fulfilling the immediate needs of those who are disadvantaged (termed immediate aid appeals). This manuscript explores an alternative positioning strategy focused on the use of autonomous aid appeals, which promote the use of donated funds to facilitate the eventual self-sufficiency of those in need. Seven studies show that individuals are more likely to donate to a charity that uses autonomous aid appeals over immediate aid appeals. This effect is generalized to various contexts and examined with actual donation behavior. Additionally, managerially relevant boundary conditions are explored and found to support a serial mediation model first through perceptions of impact followed by feelings of hope for the recipient’s future. The proposed framework is supported through mediation analyses and two process-by-moderation studies. Practical implications for charities and their promotional messaging are provided.
The current literature has revealed mixed evidence on whether loss (vs. gain) context promotes or curtails human prosociality. The current study (N=96) aimed to address this issue by examining whether gain/loss context has distinct effects on different prosocial preferences combining computational modelling with Dictator Game and Message Game. These interactive games allow for dissociating preferences for generosity and honesty, which have been respectively associated with intuitive and deliberative systems. Our behavioural and computational modelling results indicate that loss context enhances concerns for generosity but reduces concerns for honesty. These findings support an account under the framework of dual process model asserting that loss facilitates intuitive responses during social decision-making, regardless of whether they are prosocial or proself. The current findings reconcile previous debates on the relationship between loss-gain context and human prosociality and shed light on the design of institutions to promote human prosocial behaviours.
What must affluent people do to alleviate global poverty? This question has occupied moral and political philosophers for forty years. But the controversy has reached an impasse: approaches like utilitarianism and libertarianism either demand too much of ordinary mortals or else let them off the hook. In Distant Strangers, Judith Lichtenberg shows how a preoccupation with standard moral theories and with the concepts of duty and obligation have led philosophers astray. She argues that there are serious limits to what can be demanded of ordinary human beings, but this does not mean we must abandon the moral imperative to reduce poverty. Drawing on findings from behavioral economics and psychology, she shows how we can motivate better-off people to lessen poverty without demanding unrealistic levels of moral virtue. Lichtenberg argues convincingly that this approach is not only practically, but morally, appropriate.
In March 2018, 61-year-old trucker and stuntman “Mad” Mike Hughes shot himself up in a homemade rocket in the Mojave Desert.
Purpose – The objective of this study is to examine the drivers of retail apps satisfaction and continuance intention. An integrative theoretical framework was developed based on the IS success model, E-S-QUAL and expectancy and disconfirmation model to explain retail apps users’ satisfaction and continuance intention.
Design/methodology/approach – A total of 359 useable data were collected from the targeted Malaysian respondents who had experience in using retail apps services. Data were analysed using the partial least squares technique.
Findings – The results indicate that system quality and e-service quality positively influence retail apps usage satisfaction and have positive direct and indirect effects through satisfaction on continuance intention. The price level has a negative effect on retail apps usage satisfaction. Even though price level has no direct effect on continuance intention to use retail apps, it has an indirect effect on continuance intention through satisfaction.
Originality/value – Although the success of a marketing channel mainly depends on its continuance usage rather than first-time usage, few studies have paid attention to retail apps services. This study contributes to the advancement of knowledge on retail apps by explaining the roles of system quality, e-service quality and price level on retail apps satisfaction and continuance intention. Interestingly, the findings of multi-group analysis imply that female Gen Y app users are more satisfied than males while such differences do not impact their continuance intention to use the retail apps. The findings also suggested that frequency of using apps has no relevance to retail apps user satisfaction, but highly relevant to their continuance intention to use retail Apps services.
“Charitable fundraising” refers to legally qualified charitable organizations soliciting donations openly from society for the purpose of helping people. The “charitable fundraising” to be discussed in the present chapter refers to the activities of raising charitable donations organized by charity organizations as qualified legal persons. As stipulated by the Chinese laws and regulations, there are three forms of organizations that engage in charitable undertakings in China. They are social organizations, foundations, and non-governmental non-enterprise organizations. These charity organizations, which serve as the subjects of the activity of raising charitable donations, are also the agencies receiving social donations and connecting the donors and the recipients. Exploring fundraising methods from the perspective of charity organizations is an important part of the study of charitable donation mechanism.
While deliberation has traditionally played a central role in philosophical and behavioral accounts of ethical decision-making, several recent studies challenge the value of deliberation. These studies find that deliberative thinking, such as considering divergent views or different perspectives, leads to less ethical decisions. We observe, however, that these studies do not address normative deliberation, in which decision-makers consider or apply a normative standard. We predict that normative deliberation improves ethical decision-making. Across six experiments, we examine the effects of non-normative deliberation (mathematical calculations, word problems) and normative deliberation (elicited by considering ethical obligations, stakeholder interests, or a corporate ethics framework) on ethical decision-making (judgments, intentions, and behaviors). We find that normative deliberation improves ethical decision-making and, in contrast to recent studies, no form of deliberation harms ethical decision-making.
Purpose
Recent research has demonstrated that people are more likely to engage with fatty food content online. One way health advocates might facilitate engagement with healthier, calorie-light foods is to alter how people process food media. This research paper aims to investigate the moderating role of viewer mindset on consumer responses to digital food media.
Design/methodology/approach
Two experiments were conducted by manipulating the caloric density of food media content and/or one’s mindset before viewing.
Findings
Results show that the relationship between nutrition and engagement is moderated by consumer mindset, where activating a more calculative mindset before exposure can elevate social media engagement for calorie-light food media content.
Research limitations/implications
These findings contribute to the domain of obesogenic digital environments and the role of nutrition in consuming food media. By examining how mindsets interact with affective evaluations, this work demonstrates that a default mindset based on instinct can be shifted and thus alter subsequent behavioral intentions.
Practical implications
This work provides insight into what can boost the visibility and engagement of healthy food content on social media. Marketers can help promote healthier food media by cueing consumers to think more deliberately before exposure.
Originality/value
This research builds on recent work by demonstrating how to boost engagement with healthy foods on social media by cueing a more thoughtful mindset.
The identifiable victim effect describes the stronger tendency to help a specific victim than to help unidentified victims. Our reanalysis of a meta-analysis on the effect by Lee and Freely (2016) using robust Bayesian meta-analysis suggested publication bias in the literature, and the need to revisit the phenomenon. We conducted a pre-registered far replication and extension of Studies 1 and 3 in Small et al. (2007), a seminal demonstration of the identifiable victim effect, examining intent to donate. We examined the impact of deliberative thinking on the identifiable victim effect both by directly informing participants of the effect (Study 1) and by providing an identified victim with statistical information (Study 3). We found no empirical support for the identifiable victim effect (η_p^2= .000, 95% CI [.000, .003]) and subsequently no support for debiasing such a phenomenon (η_p^2= .001, 95% CI[.000, .012]). These findings suggest that the identifiable victim may be better framed in terms of ‘scope-insensitivity’. In other words, rather than providing more to a single identified victim, participants seem to be insensitive to the number of victims affected. However, our study involved only hypothetical donations rather than a real-effort real-donation paradigm as in Small et al. (2007). Therefore, we hope that our results spark motivation for future high-powered replications with real money donations, ideally carried out as registered reports and in collaboration with proponents of the original effect. . Materials, data, and code were made available on the OSF: https://osf.io/n4jkh/?view_only=d52771c7540a4a8f8051c8b430a6f15d .
Crowdfunding platforms have emerged as a popular method to raise funds for both for‐profit and non‐profits. Charities often use donation‐based crowdfunding platforms to reach out to a wider audience for fundraising campaigns. Key three performance metrics that affect the success of a donation campaign are social media spread of the campaign message, number of donors who decide to donate from seeing the message, and donation amount per donor. This research investigates the effectiveness of negatively framed messages on these three metrics. Analysis of message content of more than 3800 charities on GoFundMe.com via text mining was conducted to form a measure of the negativity of the appeals. Also for each charity, the three performance metrics were collected. Results showed that negatively framed messages led to a greater number of donors and greater sharing of the message on social media, but smaller donation amounts per donor. Implication for charity organizations is that negatively framed messages will be more effective if the goal is to obtain a broad base of support, while positively framed messages will be more effective if the objective is to increase the average donation amount.
The project of naturalizing ethics has multiple contributions, from cognitive and moral psychology to primatology, neuroscience or evolutionary theory. One of the strategies for naturalizing ethics has been to argue that moral norms and values can be explained away if we focus on their causal history, if it is possible to offer both an ultimate and proximate causal explanation for them. In this article, I will focus on the contribution of cognitive and moral psychology as a way of offering a proximate causal explanation for moral judgments. I am mostly interested in understanding to what extent these cognitive and psychological questions have some bearing in the fields of ethics and meta-ethics. Does this research programme put at stake the contention that ethics is a manifestation of human rationality? Is it true that finding the cognitive underpinnings of some of our moral judgments vindicates some meta-ethical position, namely some kind of reductionist naturalism? In the end, I will argue that even if scientific disciplines such as cognitive psychology give us a naturalized picture of the moral agent, there seem to be no reasons to think that from a naturalized perspective of the agent capable of perceiving value it must follow the naturalization of value itself.
Sharing in the experiences of others often feels like a natural inclination, yet several groups have converged on the idea that empathy reflects motivated choices. Although sometimes criticized for being unreliable, many studies suggest that empathy depends on motivated emotion regulation: people appraise the costs and benefits of empathizing, and then regulate empathy based on their evaluations of its anticipated outcomes. In the current review, we begin by highlighting the importance of the motivated empathy question from a psychological and ethical perspective, and how early empathy avoidance experiments set the stage for the recent resurgence of interest in the topic. We discuss how experimental approaches to testing motivated empathy can provide alternative explanations of empathy failures such as compassion collapse and fatigue—turning a question of whether we can empathize with mass suffering into one of whether we will empathize. We furthermore highlight our free-choice approach to understanding empathic propensity that draws upon cognitive science and economics—the empathy selection task—and then outline four categories of extensions with this approach, including testing motivational interventions, extending to other social emotional processes (e.g., compassion, moral outrage), testing group differences in empathy, and understanding empathy choice strategies. Treating empathy as a choice opens new perspectives for evaluating the possibilities of understanding other minds.
Are philosophical arguments as effective as narratives in influencing charitable giving and attitudes toward it? In four experiments, we exposed online research participants to either philosophical arguments in favor of charitable giving, a narrative about a child whose life was improved by charitable donations, both the narrative and the argument, or a control text (a passage from a middle school physics text or a description of charitable organizations). Participants then expressed their attitudes toward charitable giving and were either asked how much they would hypothetically donate if given $10 (Experiment 1) or told they had a 10% chance of winning $10 and given the opportunity to donate from their potential winnings (Experiments 2–4). Across the four experiments, participants in all of the narrative conditions and in some of the argument conditions tended to express more positive attitudes toward charitable giving and donated about $1 more on average than did participants in the control conditions. These effects appear to have been mediated by the “narrative transportation” scale, which suggests that appeals to donate can be effective if they engage participants’ emotions, imagery, and interest.
Decision support systems are increasingly being adopted by various digital platforms. However, prior research has shown that certain contexts can induce algorithm aversion, leading people to reject their decision support. This paper investigates how and why the context in which users are making decisions (for-profit versus prosocial microlending decisions) affects their degree of algorithm aversion and ultimately their preference for more human-like (versus computer-like) decision support systems. The study proposes that contexts vary in their affordances for self-humanization. Specifically, people perceive prosocial decisions as more relevant to self-humanization than for-profit contexts, and, in consequence, they ascribe more importance to empathy and autonomy while making decisions in prosocial contexts. This increased importance of empathy and autonomy leads to a higher degree of algorithm aversion. At the same time, it also leads to a stronger preference for human-like decision support, which could therefore serve as a remedy for an algorithm aversion induced by the need for self-humanization. The results from an online experiment support the theorizing. The paper discusses both theoretical and design implications, especially for the potential of anthropomorphized conversational agents on platforms for prosocial decision-making.
Charitable activities emphasizing distant recipients or places often struggle to attract contributions because consumers tend to be more willing to help others who are spatially closer to them. Therefore, identifying methods to promote prosocial intentions toward distant recipients is critical, and the present study considers the implications of social crowding, as a common environmental factor, for evoking such prosocial intentions. Four studies conducted online and in the laboratory demonstrate that consumers are more likely to feel a stronger social connection to recipients of help in uncrowded (vs. crowded) environments, which, in turn, increases their helping intentions. This influence of social crowding on prosocial intentions is also moderated by spatial distance such that the effect is more significant when the charitable project targets distant (vs. closer) recipients.
This research examines consumers’ compliance with behaviors that focus on preventing the spread of COVID‐19. Drawing on Protection Motivation Theory and research on efficacy, we find that, during a pandemic, consumers who have higher perceptions of response efficacy are less likely to engage in risky consumption behaviors (Study 1) and more likely to engage in protective consumption behaviors (Study 2). This effect is moderated by risk aversion, such that as risk aversion increases, COVID‐compliant behaviors increase even when consumers do not believe in their ability to effectuate change. Further, the relationship between response efficacy and COVID‐compliant behaviors is mediated by anticipated guilt. Importantly, these constructs are relevant beyond the COVID‐19 pandemic. As situations like drought, rising sea levels, and infectious diseases persist, consumers will continually be asked to sacrifice for their own wellbeing and the wellbeing of others. Thus, we discuss implications for policymakers. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.
The explicit imperative to “tell a story” recently dominating UK and US fundraising discourse refers specifically to the central compelling “story” of the representative victim/beneficiary, and yet there are multiple stories at work in charity fundraising letters, with interdependent narrative trajectories. This article draws on small stories research and on scholarship on storytelling and ethics to explore the relative narrativity of the stories within charity fundraising letters and their marked contingence upon lack of resolution. This article also disentangles and investigates the interactions among the stories of the representative beneficiary, the addressee as potential donor, and the charitable organization. It discusses the affirmation and exploitation of Western neoliberal individualism in the selective spotlighting of an individual beneficiary, and in the individualized appeal to the addressee. It discusses the tensions between the charitable organization and the addressee as competing contenders for the archetypal role of the “hero” in the narrative of the victim/beneficiary, and reflects on the ways in which the complex narratives of supraindividual social processes involved both in the causes of suffering and need and in their alleviation are downplayed in the service of more impactful individualistic narratives.
Cooley et al. (2017) found that subtle shifts in linguistic framing can enhance the amount of "mind" perceived in a target, and in turn increase feelings of sympathy toward that target. The four studies reported here evaluated whether these findings generalize to different populations and contexts. The first two studies served as conceptual replications in a different participant population (university students, instead of mTurk workers), and found results largely consistent with Cooley et al.'s (2017): the group composition frame ("15 individuals who work for a small accounting company") evoked greater perceptions of experience and agency, and more sympathy for the target, than the group frame ("a small accounting company comprising 15 people"). Studies 3 and 4 tested whether the group composition technique would lead to similar persuasive outcomes (increased mind perception, helping, and donations) in a refugee aid context and found only limited evidence that it might. These inconclusive findings were likely complicated by both the liberal skew of the sample and the strong impact of political identity on responses to the politically charged topic of refugees. For the purposes of practical application, an expanded understanding of boundary effects can help provide a better sense of when, why, and on whom the use of adjusted linguistic frames is most likely to be effective. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).
Experimental psychology’s recent shift toward low-effort, high-volume methods (e.g., self-reports, online studies) and away from the more effortful study of naturalistic behavior raises concerns about the ecological validity of findings from these fields, concerns that have become particularly apparent in the field of moral psychology. To help address these concerns, we introduce a method allowing researchers to investigate an important, widespread form of altruistic behavior–charitable donations–in a manner balancing competing concerns about internal validity, ecological validity, and ease of implementation: relief registries, which leverage existing online gift registry platforms to allow research subjects to choose among highly needed donation items to ship directly to charitable organizations. Here, we demonstrate the use of relief registries in two experiments exploring the ecological validity of the finding from our own research that people are more willing to help others after having imagined themselves doing so. In this way, we sought to provide a blueprint for researchers seeking to enhance the ecological validity of their own research in a narrow sense (i.e., by using the relief registry method we introduce) and in broader terms by adapting methods that take advantage of modern technology to directly impact others’ lives outside the lab.
Since stakeholder theory revolves around the management of firm-stakeholder relationships, it requires a profound understanding of stakeholders and their human nature. Insights from (social) psychology and other behavioral disciplines can therefore benefit stakeholder theory enormously. However, research that explores such micro-foundations of stakeholder theory is still scarce. To highlight resulting limitations in our understanding of stakeholders and their relationships with firms, this chapter serves three purposes. First, it provides selected examples of insightful micro-level research to illustrate the ability of micro-theory to inform stakeholder theory. Topics include organizational justice, reciprocity and generalized exchange, ethics and values, cooperation and conflict, trust, relational bonding, and culture. Second, this chapter suggests some micro-theoretical topics that represent promising avenues for future research. Included are expectancy theory, escalating commitment, cognition, sensemaking, goal setting (framing), and exchange rules. Third, this chapter illustrates the potential impact of micro-foundations research on stakeholder theory by applying goal framing and exchange rules to a central problem in stakeholder management, viz. the question of how much value a firm needs to allocate to a stakeholder in order to motivate his/her ongoing contribution to value creation. This micro-theoretical approach advances our understanding of the value distribution problem.KeywordsStakeholder theoryOrganizational justiceReciprocityTrustEscalating commitmentSensemaking
The use of evidence in bolstering message believability has been shown in the literature. However, more work is needed to understand the effect of evidence in the monetary donation context for nonprofit organizations. This paper aims to partially close the knowledge gap in this area by (i) comparing the effectiveness of statistical and narrative donation messages on message believability, (ii) investigating the moderating effect of abstract and concrete mindset on the relationship between message type and believability, and (iii) analyzing the resulting effect on subsequent donation intentions. Our findings show that there is no difference in the effect of statistical versus narrative messages on message believability when the recipient of the message is in abstract mindset. However, when the recipient is in concrete mindset, statistical messages lead to stronger believability perceptions. Furthermore, higher believability is found to increase individual monetary donation intentions.
Sustainable consumption and green marketing are receiving considerable attention. Nevertheless, the focus of past studies has always been on customer participation, with less attention given to how to satisfy those customers. Also, the focus has been on participants in green programs and not those who choose not to participate. The use of incentives to encourage voluntary green program participation is quite uncommon. The purpose of this research is to examine how manipulating the different types and levels of incentives affect the relationship between voluntary green program participation and satisfaction through the mediating role of warm glow. Three experimental studies were carried out, and data were tested and analyzed using SPSS and PROCESS macro. Results show that the best option to be used by managers to satisfy participants and non-participants of green programs when incentivizing participation is the high self-benefiting incentive. Yet, if this is not feasible, then the second-best option is not to incentivize participation.
Fundraising involves the simultaneous consideration of three actors-the donor, the charitable organization raising the funds, and the beneficiary. Successful fundraising appeals match donor motivations to preferred organizational and beneficiary attributes while acknowledging the influence of alternative, competitive appeals. In this paper, we propose an integrated method of analysis that combines multiple conjoint analyses for understanding preferences for charities and beneficiaries, with donor text and scaled responses describing their motivations. Analyses revealed five donor archetypes (i.e., exemplars): 'Cancer Carers' (24%), 'Effective Altruists' (19%), 'Animal and Nature Lovers' (16%), 'Emergency Responders' (23%), and 'Feel-good Do-gooders' (18%). These archetypes cannot be understood with exclusive reference to donor characteristics and motivations; rather archetypes combine donor characteristics with features of preferred beneficiaries and fundraisers. We show how our model can be used to conduct integrated, conditional and competitive analyses useful for fundraising design.
In this chapter, the authors investigate the role of lay beliefs in protecting our minds against unwanted influences on our own beliefs and emotions—what the authors call mental contamination. People's naive theories about how and when their beliefs and emotions could change determine the specific strategy they follow in order not to be contaminated. The authors suggest that we distinguish between an implicit level of psychology which operates largely outside our awareness (people's use of schematic knowledge) and an explicit level of psychology (meta-beliefs about cognitive processes). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
A fundamental principle of psychophysics is that people's ability to discriminate change in a physical stimulus diminishes as the magnitude of the stimulus increases. We find that people also exhibit diminished sensitivity in valuing lifesaving interventions against a background of increasing numbers of lives at risk. We call this psychophysical numbing. Studies 1 and 2 found that an intervention saving a fixed number of lives was judged significantly more beneficial when fewer lives were at risk overall. Study 3 found that respondents wanted the minimum number of lives a medical treatment would have to save to merit a fixed amount of funding to be much greater for a disease with a larger number of potential victims than for a disease with a smaller number. The need to better understand the dynamics of psychophysical numbing and to determine its effects on decision making is discussed.
We consider the problem of the evolution of the interface given by two incompressible fluids through a porous medium, which
is known as the Muskat problem and in two dimensions it is mathematically analogous to the two-phase Hele–Shaw cell. We focus
on a fluid interface given by a jump of densities, being the equation of the evolution obtained using Darcy’s law. We prove
local well-posedness when the smaller density is above (stable case) and in the unstable case we show ill-posedness.
Distinctions have been proposed between systems of reasoning for centuries.
This article distills properties shared by many of these distinctions
and characterizes the resulting systems in light of recent findings
and theoretical developments. One system is associative because its
computations reflect similarity structure and relations of temporal
contiguity. The other is "rule based" because it operates on symbolic
structures that have logical content and variables and because its
computations have the properties that are normally assigned to rules.
The systems serve complementary functions and can simultaneously
generate different solutions to a reasoning problem. The rule-based
system can suppress the associative system but not completely inhibit
it. The article reviews evidence in favor of the distinction and
its characterization.
The Muskat problem models the evolution of the interface given by two
different fluids in porous media. The Rayleigh-Taylor condition is natural to
reach the linear stability of the Muskat problem. We show that the
Rayleigh-Taylor condition may hold initially but break down in finite time. As
a consequence of the method used, we prove the existence of water waves
turning.
The Muskat problem models the dynamics of the interface between two incompressible immiscible fluids with different constant densities. In this work we prove three results. First we prove an $L^2(\R)$ maximum principle, in the form of a new ``log'' conservation law \eqref{ln} which is satisfied by the equation \eqref{ec1d} for the interface. Our second result is a proof of global existence of Lipschitz continuous solutions for initial data that satisfy $\|f_0\|_{L^\infty}<\infty$ and $\|\partial_x f_0\|_{L^\infty}<1$. We take advantage of the fact that the bound $\|\partial_x f_0\|_{L^\infty}<1$ is propagated by solutions, which grants strong compactness properties in comparison to the log conservation law. Lastly, we prove a global existence result for unique strong solutions if the initial data is smaller than an explicitly computable constant, for instance $\| f\|_1 \le 1/5$. Previous results of this sort used a small constant $\epsilon \ll1$ which was not explicit. Comment: 31 pages
We consider in this paper the Muskat problem in a periodic geometry and
incorporate capillary as well as gravity effects in the modelling. The problem
re-writes as an abstract evolution equation and we use this property to prove
well-posedness of the problem and to establish exponential stability of some
flat equilibrium. Using bifurcation theory we also find finger shaped
steady-states which are all unstable.
In this work we consider weak solutions of the incompressible 2-D porous
media equation. By using the approach of De Lellis-Sz\'ekelyhidi we prove
non-uniqueness for solutions in $L^\infty$ in space and time.
This article examines how consumer decision making is influenced by automatically evoked task-induced affect and by cognitions that are generated in a more controlled manner on exposure to alternatives in a choice task. Across two experiments respondents chose between two alternatives: one (chocolate cake) associated with more intense positive affect but less favorable cognitions, compared to a second (fruit salad) associated with less favorable affect but more favorable cognitions. Findings from the two experiments suggest that if processing resources are limited, spontaneously evoked affective reactions rather than cognitions tend to have a greater impact on choice. As a result, the consumer is more likely to choose the alternative that is superior on the affective dimension but inferior on the cognitive dimension (e.g., chocolate cake). In contrast, when the availability of processing resources is high, cognitions related to the consequences of choosing the alternatives tend to have a bigger impact on choice compared to when the availability of these resources is low. As a result, the consumer is more likely to choose the alternative that is inferior on the affective dimension but superior on the cognitive dimension (e.g., fruit salad). The moderating roles of the mode of presentation of the alternatives and of a personality variable related to impulsivity are also reported. Copyright 1999 by the University of Chicago.
Cognitive-experiential self-theory integrates the cognitive and the psychodynamic unconscious by assuming the existence of two parallel, interacting modes of information processing: a rational system and an emotionally driven experiential system. Support for the theory is provided by the convergence of a wide variety of theoretical positions on two similar processing modes; by real-life phenomena--such as conflicts between the heart and the head; the appeal of concrete, imagistic, and narrative representations; superstitious thinking; and the ubiquity of religion throughout recorded history--and by laboratory research, including the prediction of new phenomena in heuristic reasoning.
When an attitude changes from A1 to A2, what happens to A1? Most theories assume, at least implicitly, that the new attitude replaces the former one. The authors argue that a new attitude can override, but not replace, the old one, resulting in dual attitudes. Dual attitudes are defined as different evaluations of the same attitude object: an automatic, implicit attitude and an explicit attitude. The attitude that people endorse depends on whether they have the cognitive capacity to retrieve the explicit attitude and whether this overrides their implicit attitude. A number of literatures consistent with these hypotheses are reviewed, and the implications of the dual-attitude model for attitude theory and measurement are discussed. For example, by including only explicit measures, previous studies may have exaggerated the ease with which people change their attitudes. Even if an explicit attitude changes, an implicit attitude can remain the same.
Research has consistently found that liberals and conservatives generate different attributions for the causes of social problems and respond differently to people who have internal-controllable causes for needing help. Five studies using a variety of methods (the "college bowl" paradigm, the attitude-attribution paradigm, 2 surveys with nationally representative samples, and an experiment that assessed attributional judgments under varying levels of cognitive load) explored whether these differences could be explained by (a) underlying dispositional differences in the tendency to see the causes of behavior as personally or situationally located, (b) ideological scripts, or (c) differences in the motivation to correct personal attributions. Results were most consistent with the motivated correction explanation. The findings shed further light on the cognitive strategies and motivational priorities of liberals and conservatives.
This article describes a 2-systems model that explains social behavior as a joint function of reflective and impulsive processes. In particular, it is assumed that social behavior is controlled by 2 interacting systems that follow different operating principles. The reflective system generates behavioral decisions that are based on knowledge about facts and values, whereas the impulsive system elicits behavior through associative links and motivational orientations. The proposed model describes how the 2 systems interact at various stages of processing, and how their outputs may determine behavior in a synergistic or antagonistic fashion. It extends previous models by integrating motivational components that allow more precise predictions of behavior. The implications of this reflective-impulsive model are applied to various phenomena from social psychology and beyond. Extending previous dual-process accounts, this model is not limited to specific domains of mental functioning and attempts to integrate cognitive, motivational, and behavioral mechanisms.
Although it has been claimed that people care more about identifiable than statistical victims, demonstrating this "identifiable victim effect" has proven difficult because identification usually provides information about a victim, and people may respond to the information rather than to identification per se. We show that a very weak form of identifiability--determining the victim without providing any personalizing information--increases caring. In the first, laboratory study, subjects were more willing to compensate others who lost money when the losers had already been determined than when they were about to be. In the second, field study, people contributed more to a charity when their contributions would benefit a family that had already been selected from a list than when told that the family would be selected from the same list. Copyright 2003 by Kluwer Academic Publishers
It is widely believed that people are willing to expend greater resources to save the lives of identified victims than to save equal numbers of unidentified or statistical victims. There are many possible causes of this disparity which have not been enumerated previously or tested empirically. We discuss four possible causes of the "identifiable victim effect" and present the results of two studies which indicate that the most important cause of the disparity in treatment of identifiable and statistical lives is that, for identifiable victims, a high proportion of those at risk can be saved.
Copyright 1997 by Kluwer Academic Publishers
In the ideal vision of public finance, each dollar of government spending is allocated to the area where it can do the most good, and taxes are levied and revenues spent to the point where the marginal value of a public dollar is equal to that of a private dollar. Reality falls short of this ideal in many ways. The political system doesn't necessarily aggregate preferences the way a market would; politicians and government workers may be corrupt or have their own personal agendas; and different groups have different incentives and capabilities to coordinate and lobby for their interests. Here we focus on yet another reason for why taxation and government spending can go awry: human psychology, and specifically the lack of proportionality between human sympathy and the wants and needs of those toward whom the sympathy, or lack thereof, is directed. As Adam Smith observed in the Theory of Moral Sentiments, we often feel little sympathy toward people who deserve it. He illustrates the point vividly with the hypothetical case of a European man who gets more upset over losing his little finger than over a calamity that wipes out a large fraction of the population of China. However, the disproportionality can also go in the opposite direction. As Smith also points out, "we sometimes feel for another, a passion of which he himself seems to be altogether incapable," as illustrated by the dismay of the mother of a sick child which, as he puts it, "feels only the uneasiness of the present instant, which can never be great" (1759/2000, 8). Smith adds dryly that "we sympathize even with the dead, who themselves experience nothing" (1759/2000, 8). Our main focus here is on a specific source of arbitrariness in human sympathy: The disproportionate sympathy and attention to identifiable rather than statistical victims.
When a viscous fluid filling the voids in a porous medium is driven forwards by the pressure of another driving fluid, the interface between them is liable to be unstable if the driving fluid is the less viscous of the two. This condition occurs in oil fields. To describe the normal modes of small disturbances from a plane interface and their rate of growth, it is necessary to know, or to assume one knows, the conditions which must be satisfied at the interface. The simplest assumption, that the fluids remain completely separated along a definite interface, leads to formulae which are analogous to known expressions developed by scientists working in the oil industry, and also analogous to expressions representing the instability of accelerated interfaces between fluids of different densities. In the latter case the instability develops into round-ended fingers of less dense fluid penetrating into the more dense one. Experiments in which a viscous fluid confined between closely spaced parallel sheets of glass, a Hele-Shaw cell, is driven out by a less viscous one reveal a similar state. The motion in a Hele-Shaw cell is mathematically analogous to two-dimensional flow in a porous medium. Analysis which assumes continuity of pressure through the interface shows that a flow is possible in which equally spaced fingers advance steadily. The ratio lambda = (width of finger)/ (spacing of fingers) appears as the parameter in a singly infinite set of such motions, all of which appear equally possible. Experiments in which various fluids were forced into a narrow Hele-Shaw cell showed that single fingers can be produced, and that unless the flow is very slow lambda = (width of finger)/(width of channel) is close to 1/2, so that behind the tips of the advancing fingers the widths of the two columns of fluid are equal. When lambda =1/2 the calculated form of the fingers is very close to that which is registered photographically in the Hele-Shaw cell, but at very slow speeds where the measured value of lambda increased from 1/2 to the limit 1\cdot 0 as the speed decreased to zero, there were considerable differences. Assuming that these might be due to surface tension, experiments were made in which a fluid of small viscosity, air or water, displaced a much more viscous oil. It is to be expected in that case that lambda would be a function of mu U/T only, where mu is the viscosity, U the speed of advance and T the interfacial tension. This was verified using air as the less viscous fluid penetrating two oils of viscosities 0\cdot 30 and 4\cdot 5 poises.
Consumers often face emotion-laden choices involving conflicting goals of personal importance (e.g., safety). Research suggests that consumers cope with the negative emotion associated with these choices by avoiding certain behaviors, in particular attribute trade-off making. This research investigates a factor that moderates these coping effects. Four experiments show that simple cognitive load can make consumers less averse to making attribute trade-offs. This research demonstrates, counterintuitively, that a reduction of cognitive resources through increased load can result in more normative decision behavior. Load apparently disinhibits trade-off making by disrupting consumers' abilities to consider relevant self goal information and the negative emotional consequences of trading off something of personal importance, thereby reducing consumers' need to cope.
Costly life-saving interventions can often be described not only in terms of the number of lives that may be saved but also in terms of the proportion of lives saved out of some total number at risk. In a phenomenon that has been referred to as psychophysical numbing (PN), Fetherstonhaugh, Slovic, Johnson, and Friedrich (1997) found that participants rated an intervention saving a fixed number of lives to be less worth investing in when more total lives were at risk (i.e., when saved lives represented a smaller proportion of the total threat or problem). In two new experiments, life-valuation correlates of PN responding, as well as manipulations of death salience, accountability, and economics focus, were explored in the context of students’ willingness to support mandatory antilock brake requirements for new cars. PN responding was pervasive, but non-PN responders were clearly distinguished by the greater overall value they placed on saving lives. Salience and accountability manipulations did not debias judgments but did tend to rule out low-effort processing as an explanation for these quantity confusions. An emphasis on economic considerations was consistently related to greater PN responding.
In this paper the Muskat problem which describes a two-phase flow of two fluids, for example, oil and water, in porous media is discussed. The problem involves in seeking two time-dependent harmonic functions u1(x,y,t) and u2(x,y,t) in oil and water regions, respectively, and the interface between oil and water, i.e., the free boundary Γ:y=ρ(x,t), such that on the free boundary u1=u2,Vn=−k1∂u1∂n=−k2∂u2∂n, where n the unit normal vector on the free boundary toward oil region, Vn is the normal velocity of the free boundary Γ, k1 and k2 are positive constants satisfying k1>k2. We prove the existence of classical solution globally in time under some reasonable assumptions. The argument developed in this paper can be used in any multidimensional case.
The authors analyse an equation governing the motion of an interface between two fluids in a pressure field. In two dimensions, the interface is described by a conformal mapping which is analytic in the exterior of the unit disc. This mapping obeys a non-local nonlinear equation. When there is no pumping at infinity, there is conservation of area and contraction of the length of the interface. They prove global in time existence for small analytic perturbations of the circle as well as nonlinear asymptotic stability of the steady circular solution. The same method yields well-posedness of the Cauchy problem in the presence of pumping.
We draw out implications of the identifiable victim effect - the greater sympathy shown toward identifiable than statistical victims - for public finance. We first review research showing (1) that people respond more strongly to identifiable than statistical victims even when identification provides absolutely no information about the victims, (2) that the identifiable victim effect is a special case of a more general tendency to react more strongly to identifiable others whether they evoke sympathy or other emotions, and (3) that identifiability influences behavior via the emotional reactions it evokes. Next, we discuss the normative status of the effect, noting that, contrary to the usual assumption that people overreact to identifiable victims, identifiability can shift people's responses in a normatively desirable direction if people are otherwise insufficiently sympathetic toward statistical victims. Finally, we examine implications of the identifiable victim effect for public finance. We show that the identifiable victim effect can influence the popularity of different policies, for example, naturally favoring hidden taxes over those whose incidence is more easily assessed, since a hidden tax has no identifiable victims. Identifiable other effects also influence public discourse, with much of the debate about government spending and taxation being driven by vivid exemplars - iconic victims and perpetrators - rather than any rational calculation of costs and benefits.
The Muskat, or Muskat-Leibenzon, problem describes the evolution of the interface between two immiscible fluids in a porous medium or Hele-Shaw cell under applied pressure gradients or fluid injection/extraction. In contrast to the Hele-Shaw problem (the one-phase version of the Muskat problem), there are few nontrivial exact solutions or analytic results for the Muskat problem. For the stable, forward Muskat problem, in which the higher-viscosity fluid expands into the lower-viscosity fluid, we show global-in-time existence for initial data that is a small perturbation of a flat interface. The initial data in this result may contain weak (e.g., curvature) singularities. For the unstable, backward problem, in which the higher-viscosity fluid contracts, we construct singular solutions that start off with smooth initial data but develop a point of infinite curvature at finite time. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Prior research has confirmed Thomas Schelling's observation that people are more sympathetic and hence generous toward specific identified victims than toward “statistical” victims who are yet to be identified. In the study presented in this article we demonstrate an equivalent effect for punitiveness. We find that people are more punitive toward identified wrongdoers than toward equivalent, but unidentified, wrongdoers, even when identifying the wrongdoer conveys no meaningful information about him or her. To account for the effect of identifiability on both generosity and punitiveness, we propose that affective reactions of any type are stronger toward an identified than toward an unidentified target. Consistent with such an account, the effect of identifiability on punishing behavior was mediated by self-reported anger. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
People's greater willingness to help identified victims, relative to non-identified ones, was examined by varying the singularity of the victim (single vs. a group of eight individuals), and the availability of individually identifying information (the main difference being the inclusion of a picture in the “identified” versions). Results support the proposal that the “identified victim” effect is largely restricted to situations with a single victim: the identified single victim elicited considerably more contributions than the non-identified single victim, while the identification of the individual group members had essentially no effect on willingness to contribute. Participants also report experiencing distress when the victim is single and identified more than in any other condition. Hence, the emotional reaction to the victims appears to be a major source of the effect. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
The problem of the encroachment of water into an oil sand is formulated as a new type of potential problem, namely, that of finding potential distributions in two regions of different ``constants'' (``conductivities'') which are separated by a surface, each point of which has a velocity proportional to the vector gradient of the potential at the point, and such that the area swept out by the moving interface assumes the ``constant'' appropriate to that of the encroaching side of the interface. The cases of strictly linear, radial and spherical systems, in which the shapes of the interfaces are evident from symmetry requirements, are solved in detail and discussed graphically. The zeroth approximation to the general problem which gives the history of a line of fluid particles in a homogeneous system is also treated in detail. Analytical and graphical solutions are presented for (1) systems with elliptical boundaries, (2) an infinite linear source driving fluid into an isolated sink, and (3) the history of a ring of fluid particles travelling from a source to a sink. The relation of the analytical results to the practical problems of the encroachment of water into oil bearing sands is discussed both for the solutions of the general problem and those of the zeroth approximation.
People’s greater willingness to help identified victims, relative to non-identified ones, was examined by eliciting real contributions to targets varying in singularity (a single individual vs. a group of several individuals), and the availability of individually identifying information (the main difference being the inclusion of a picture in the “identified” versions). Results of the first and second experiments support the proposal that for identified victims, contributions for a single victim exceed contributions for a group when these are judged separately, but preference reverses when one has to choose between contributing to the single individual and contributing to the group. In a third experiment, ratings of emotional response were elicited in addition to willingness to contribute judgments. Results suggest that the greater contribution to a single victim relative to the group stems from intensified emotions evoked by a single identified victim rather than from emotions evoked by identified victims in general.
This paper introduces a theoretical framework that describes the importance of affect in guiding judgments and decisions. As used here, “affect” means the specific quality of “goodness” or “badness” (i) experienced as a feeling state (with or without consciousness) and (ii) demarcating a positive or negative quality of a stimulus. Affective responses occur rapidly and automatically—note how quickly you sense the feelings associated with the stimulus word “treasure” or the word “hate”. We argue that reliance on such feelings can be characterized as “the affect heuristic”. In this paper we trace the development of the affect heuristic across a variety of research paths followed by ourselves and many others. We also discuss some of the important practical implications resulting from ways that this heuristic impacts our daily lives.
Affect is considered by most contemporary theories to be postcognitive,
that is, to occur only after considerable cognitive operations have
been accomplished. Yet a number of experimental results on preferences,
attitudes, impression formation, and decision making, as well as
some clinical phenomena, suggest that affective judgments may be
fairly independent of, and precede in time, the sorts of perceptual
and cognitive operations commonly assumed to be the basis of these
affective judgments. Affective reactions to stimuli are often the
very first reactions of the organism, and for lower organisms they
are the dominant reactions. Affective reactions can occur without
extensive perceptual and cognitive encoding, are made with greater
confidence than cognitive judgments, and can be made sooner. Experimental
evidence is presented demonstrating that reliable affective discriminations
(likedislike ratings) can be made in the total absence of recognition
memory (oldnew judgments). Various differences between judgments
based on affect and those based on perceptual and cognitive processes
are examined. It is concluded that affect and cognition are under
the control of separate and partially independent systems that can
influence each other in a variety of ways, and that both constitute
independent sources of effects in information processing. (139 ref)
(PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2009 APA, all rights reserved)
It was shown recently by Cordoba, Faraco and Gancedo that the 2D porous media
equation admits weak solutions with compact support in time. The proof, based
on the convex integration framework, uses ideas from the theory of laminates,
in particular T4 configurations. In this note we calculate the explicit
relaxation of IPM, thus avoiding T4 configurations. We then use this to
construct weak solutions to the unstable interface problem (the Muskat
problem), as a byproduct shedding new light on the gradient flow approach
introduced by Otto.
We show that a general class of active scalar equations, including porous media and certain magnetostrophic turbulence models, admit non-unique weak solutions in the class of bounded functions. The proof is based upon the method of convex integration recently implemented for equations of fluid dynamics in [2,3]. Comment: 19 pages
We define mental contamination as the process whereby a person has an unwanted response because of mental processing that is unconscious or uncontrollable. This type of bias is distinguishable from the failure to know or apply normative rules of inference and can be further divided into the unwanted consequences of automatic processing and source confusion, which is the confusion of 2 or more causes of a response. Mental contamination is difficult to avoid because it results from both fundamental properties of human cognition (e.g., a lack of awareness of mental processes) and faulty lay beliefs about the mind (e.g., incorrect theories about mental biases). People's lay beliefs determine the steps they take (or fail to take) to correct their judgments and thus are an important but neglected source of biased responses. Strategies for avoiding contamination, such as controlling one's exposure to biasing information, are discussed.
This research investigated the relationship between the magnitude or scope of a stimulus and its subjective value by contrasting 2 psychological processes that may be used to construct preferences: valuation by feeling and valuation by calculation. The results show that when people rely on feeling, they are sensitive to the presence or absence of a stimulus (i.e., the difference between 0 and some scope) but are largely insensitive to further variations of scope. In contrast, when people rely on calculation, they reveal relatively more constant sensitivity to scope. Thus, value is nearly a step function of scope when feeling predominates and is closer to a linear function when calculation predominates. These findings may allow for a novel interpretation of why most real-world value functions are concave and how the processes responsible for nonlinearity of value may also contribute to nonlinear probability weighting.
Subjects were less willing to pay for government medical insurance for diseases when the number of people who could not be cured was higher, holding constant the number who could be cured. In a second experiment, willingness to pay (from a hypothetical government windfall) for risk reduction was unaffected by whether the risk was described in terms of percentage or number of lives saved, even though subjects knew that the risks in question differed in prevalence. These results are consistent with the findings of Fetherstonhaugh et al., Jenni and Loewenstein, and others. I suggest that these results can be explained in terms of a general tendency to confuse proportions and differences, a confusion that is analogous to other confusions of quantitative dimensions in children, adults, the news media, and perhaps even the epidemiological literature.
Copyright 1997 by Kluwer Academic Publishers
Every dog has its day—but at what price? The Register Guard, Reflective and impulsive determi-nants of social behavior
- J Song
- a
- F Strack
- R Deutsch
Song, J. (2002, April 26). Every dog has its day—but at what price? The Register Guard, 15A. Strack, F., & Deutsch, R. (2004). Reflective and impulsive determi-nants of social behavior. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 8(3), 220–247.
Every dog has its day-but at what price? The Register Guard
- J Song
Song, J. (2002, April 26). Every dog has its day—but at what price?
The Register Guard, 15A.
The affect heuristic Heuristics and biases: The psychology of intuitive judgment
- P Slovic
- M Finucane
- E R Peters
- D G Macgregor
Slovic, P., Finucane, M., Peters, E. R., & MacGregor, D. G. (2002).
The affect heuristic. In T. Gilovich, D. Griffin, & D. Kahneman
(Eds.), Heuristics and biases: The psychology of intuitive judgment
(pp. 397–420). New York: Cambridge University Press.