Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Abstract

The solicitation of charitable donations costs billions of dollars annually. Here, we introduce a virtually costless method for boosting charitable donations to a group of needy persons: merely asking donors to indicate a hypothetical amount for helping one of the needy persons before asking donors to decide how much to donate for all of the needy persons. We demonstrated, in both real fund-raisers and scenario-based research, that this simple unit-asking method greatly increases donations for the group of needy persons. Different from phenomena such as the foot-in-the-door and identifiable-victim effects, the unit-asking effect arises because donors are initially scope insensitive and subsequently scope consistent. The method applies to both traditional paper-based fund-raisers and increasingly popular Web-based fund-raisers and has implications for domains other than fund-raisers, such as auctions and budget proposals. Our research suggests that a subtle manipulation based on psychological science can generate a substantial effect in real life.

Keywords

decision making judgment

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Ariely

Loewenstein

Prelec

(2003). Coherent arbitrariness: Stable demand curves without stable preferences. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 118, 73–106.

Arkes

H. R.

Gaissmaier

(2012). Psychological research and the prostate-cancer screening controversy. Psychological Science, 23, 547–553.

Baron

Greene

(1996). Determinants of insensitivity to quantity in valuation of public goods: Contribution, warm glow, budget constraints, availability, and prominence. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 2, 107–125.

Cameron

C. D.

Payne

B. K.

(2011). Escaping affect: How motivated emotion regulation creates insensitivity to mass sufferings. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 100, 1–15.

Cialdini

R. B.

(2003). Crafting normative messages to protect the environment. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 12, 105–109.

Desvousges

W. H.

Johnson

Dunford

Hudson

Wilson

K. N.

Boyle

K. J.

(1993). Measuring resource damages with contingent valuation: Test of validity and reliability. In Hausman

(Ed.), Contingent valuation: A critical assessment (pp. 91–164). Amsterdam, The Netherlands: North-Holland.

Dunn

E. W.

Ashton-James

(2008). On emotional innumeracy: Predicted and actual affective responses to grand-scale tragedies. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 44, 692–698.

Fetherstonhaugh

Slovic

Johnson

S. M.

Friedrich

(1997). Insensitivity to the value of human life: A study of psychophysical numbing. Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, 14, 283–300.

Freedman

J. L.

Fraser

S. C.

(1966). Compliance without pressure: The foot-in-the-door technique. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 4, 195–202.

10.

Gneezy

Nelson

L. D.

Brown

(2010). Shared social responsibility: A field experiment in pay-what-you-want pricing and charitable giving. Science, 329, 325–327.

11.

Greenfield

J. M.

(1999). Fund raising: Evaluating and managing the fund development process (2nd ed.). New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons.

12.

Guéguen

Jacob

(2001). Fund-raising on the web: The effect of an electronic foot-in-the-door on donation. CyberPsychology & Behavior, 4, 705–709.

13.

Herzog

Hertwig

(2009). The wisdom of many in one mind: Individual judgments with dialectical bootstrapping. Psychological Science, 20, 231–237.

14.

Hsee

C. K.

(1996). The evaluability hypothesis: An explanation for preference reversals between joint and separate evaluations of alternatives. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 67, 247–257.

15.

Hsee

C. K.

Rottenstreich

(2004). Music, pandas, and muggers: On the affective psychology of value. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 133, 23–30.

16.

Hsee

C. K.

Zhang

(2010). General evaluability theory. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 5, 343–355.

17.

Hsee

C. K.

Zhang

(2013). [Unit asking and scope sensitivity]. Unpublished raw data.

18.

Jenni

K. E.

Loewenstein

(1997). Explaining the identified victim effect. Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, 14, 235–257.

19.

Johnson

E. J.

Goldstein

(2003). Do defaults save life? Science, 302, 1338–1339.

20.

Kahneman

Frederick

(2005). A model of heuristic judgment. In Holyoak

K. J.

Morrison

R. G.

(Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of thinking and reasoning (pp. 267–293). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

21.

Kogut

Ritov

(2005a). The “identified victim” effect: An identified group, or just a single individual? Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 18, 157–167.

22.

Kogut

Ritov

(2005b). The singularity effect of identified victims in separate and joint evaluations. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 97, 106–116.

23.

Kogut

Ritov

(2007). One of us: Outstanding willingness to help save a single identified compatriot. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 104, 150–157.

24.

Liu

Aaker

(2008). The happiness of giving: The time-ask effect. Journal of Consumer Research, 35, 543–557.

25.

Moore

D. A.

(1999). Order effects in preference judgments: Evidence for context dependence in the generation of preferences. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 78, 146–165.

26.

National Philanthropic Trust. (2012). Charitable giving statistics. Retrieved from http://www.nptrust.org/philanthropic-resources/charitable-giving-statistics

27.

Peters

Västfjäll

Gärling

Slovic

(2006). Affect and decision making: A “hot” topic. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 19, 79–85.

28.

Schultz

P. W.

Nolan

J. M.

Cialdini

R. B.

Goldstein

N. J.

Griskevicius

(2007). The constructive, destructive, and reconstructive power of social norms. Psychological Science, 18, 429–434.

29.

Slovic

(2007). If I look at the mass I will never act: Psychic numbing and genocide. Judgment and Decision Making, 2, 1–17.

30.

Slovic

Finucane

M. L.

Peters

MacGregor

D. G.

(2002). The affect heuristic. In Gilovich

Griffin

Kahneman

(Eds.), Heuristics and biases: The psychology of intuitive judgment (pp. 397–420). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

31.

Slovic

Finucane

M. L.

Peters

MacGregor

D. G.

(2007). The affect heuristic. European Journal of Operational Research, 177, 1333–1352.

32.

Small

D. A.

Loewenstein

(2003). Helping a victim or helping the victim: Altruism and identifiability. Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, 26, 5–16.

33.

Small

D. A.

Loewenstein

(2005). The devil you know: The effect of identifiability on punitiveness. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 18, 311–318.

34.

Small

D. A.

Loewenstein

Slovic

(2007). Sympathy and callousness: The impact of deliberative thought on donations to identifiable and statistical victims. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 102, 143–153.

35.

Small

D. A.

Verrochi

N. M.

(2009). The face of need: Emotional expression on charity advertisements. Journal of Marketing Research, 46, 777–787.

36.

Smith

R. W.

Faro

Burson

(2013). More for the many: The influence of entitativity on charitable giving. Journal of Consumer Research, 39, 961–976.

37.

Thaler

R. H.

Sunstein

C. R.

(2009). Nudge: Improving decisions about health, wealth, and happiness. London, England: Penguin.

Supplementary Material

Please find the following supplemental material available below.

For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.

For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.

0.00 MB

0.03 MB

Unit Asking

Abstract

Keywords

Get full access to this article

References

Supplementary Material