Empathy as added value in predicting donation behavior ¬リニ

a r t i c l e i n f o Past behavior and socio-demographics represent traditional predictors of charitable giving. The present study examines, in a real fundraising setting, whether measures of empathy (i.e., empathic concern and personal distress) can improve these predictions. The findings confirm the relevance of traditional predictor sets and the added value of including measures of empathy. Empathic concern positively affects the donation decision. In addition, empathy negatively affects the donor's generosity toward one charity. However, for people with high empathic concern, considering only generosity toward one charity could be misleading because such people are more likely to donate to different charities. This result has implications for overall generosity. Therefore, a clear distinction between both personality traits is necessary. Understanding charitable giving is a crucial element in attracting and retaining private donors, and traditional predictors rely on prior behavior and socio-demographics. The former captures recency, frequency, and monetary value (i.e., RFM variables), whereas the latter reflect features such as income, age and gender. Prior studies also regularly consider intentions as good indicators of consumer behavior. This study examines whether and how psychological measures of empathy might improve traditional models of charitable giving. Using hierarchical multiple regression analysis, this study investigates the incremental value of including measures of empathy together with traditional predictor sets, with a focus on empathic concern and personal distress as personality traits. According to Davis (1983a), both constructs involve emotional dimensions of empathy and reflect distinctive feelings toward unfortunate others or the self, in that empathic concern is other oriented, and personal distress is self-oriented. Whereas previous research proposes empathy to explain helping behavior, this study notes the predictive power of both personality measures on top of past behavior, intentions, and socio-demographics. In particular, this investigation considers two distinctive aspects of charitable giving: the decision to contribute and the extent of generosity (i.e., donation amount, assuming a donation). As another important contribution, for both dimensions, this article reports the relevance of the predictor sets in a real charitable fundraising setting. A first study uses the database of a European charity to calculate RFM variables and data augmentation through questionnaires to collect information about the other predictor sets. With transactional data about responses to charitable fundraising appeals, the real-life study considers the dependent measure of donation behavior toward one charity. Therefore, the study tests both models of donation decision and generosity for a …