Abstract
Helping behaviors are often driven by emotional reactions to the suffering of particular individuals, but these behaviors do not seem to be upregulated when many people need help. In this article, we consider if these reactions are also “innumerate” to information about how charities spend their money. Across six experiments, we examined how images of identified victims interact with information about charity efficiency (money toward program) and effectiveness (program outcome). We further examined if the images primarily get people to donate (yes/no), while efficiency/effectiveness might provide a tuning mechanism for how much to give. Results showed that images influenced the propensity to donate and induced participants donate their full bonuses, indicating heuristic effects. Efficiency and effectiveness information had no effects on donations.
Keywords
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
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.
