Donate Different p. 1 Running head: DONATE DIFFERENT Donate Different: External and Internal Influences on Emotion-Based Donation Decisions

Emotions can influence charity donation decisions in ways that people and policy makers might prefer they did not. For example, our studies demonstrate that people who are exposed to a sequence of emotionally described humanitarian crises, donate more resources to crises that just happen to arouse immediate emotions—an “immediacy bias” that can lead to higher donations toward objectively less deadly crises. Two broad categories of interventions can mitigate influences of emotion on charitable donation decisions. Externally oriented interventions refer to cues, incentives, or decision structures imposed on people. For example, people who are exposed to a sequence of emotionally evocative descriptions of human suffering and who make charitable allocations after exposure to each cause are less inclined to exhibit an immediacy bias compared with people who make allocations after exposure to the entire sequence. Internally oriented interventions, in contrast, encourage mindful decision strategies aimed at reducing the immediacy bias in donation decisions. For example, inviting people to reflect on how much they think emotional and mortality information should influence allocation decisions decreases the influence of emotion and increases the influence of mortality information in donation decisions, particularly when people believe that mortality information should be given greater weight relative to emotional considerations. The distinction between externally versus internally oriented interventions has both theoretical implications for understanding how people monitor and correct emotional influences on their own decisions and practical implications for increasing the efficiency of charitable donations. Donate Different p. 3 It has been said that feeling is for doing. Emotional arousal is a “call to action” that can elicit behavioral responses where dispassionate analysis might not. Decisions about donating resources to alleviate humanitarian suffering are no exception: Sympathetic emotions, affective reactions in response to others’ suffering, can exert powerful influence over decisions to help others. Sympathetic emotions are thus helpful determinants of helping behavior (e.g. Batson, 1990). Without such emotions, people may behave more selfishly and less altruistically. But sympathetic emotions can lead to puzzling behavior that people might prefer to avoid, especially upon reflection. For example, people may give generously to single, identifiable victims (e.g., Baby Jessica) whose plight happens to receive widespread media attention —a donation people might later think would have been better spent on alleviating starvation or providing medical care to hundreds of people in a third world country (Small & Loewenstein, 2003). Or people might donate generously to charitable causes that, owing to glossy photos and well-orchestrated marketing appeals, just happened to tug at people’s heart strings (and hence their purse strings), even though they might acknowledge that the organization to which they donated is inefficiently operated. In cases such as these, one might wonder whether people in everyday life, if not policy makers, might prefer to make donation decisions differently. If people would prefer to donate differently, in what ways would they rather make donation decisions, and how might they be encouraged to do so? We examine such questions in this chapter by reviewing recent research on the role of emotion in donation decisions and on potential strategies for altering emotionally influenced decision processes. We first offer a selective review of research indicating that emotional experiences influence donation decisions, focusing on people’s tendency to make donation decisions based on emotional factors rather than on information about the objective amount or scope of human suffering, a pattern referred to as “scope insensitivity.” We also review research recently conducted in our own lab indicating that when people learn about multiple sources of human suffering, they tend to donate more to human suffering that just happens to arouse immediate (rather than previous) emotions, which contributes to scope insensitivity. After presenting preliminary evidence that people would prefer to make donation decisions differently than they often do, giving more weight to information about the objective scope of human suffering than to emotional information, we draw a distinction between two types of strategies to alter donation decisions: Externally focused strategies emphasize constraints external to the decision maker whereas internally focused strategies emphasize factors such as selfreflection and mindfulness. We suggest that internal strategies may, on balance, be more attractive and feasible means of influencing donation decisions. Scope Insensitivity in Donation Decisions As noted earlier, sympathetic emotions can strongly influence donation decisions: People give more to those whose suffering is more upsetting compared with those whose suffering is relatively less upsetting (Batson, 1990). Sympathetic emotions are therefore helpful in that they can encourage people to donate more resources than they might otherwise. But the strong influence of sympathetic emotion on donation decisions can be problematic in at least two ways. The first is that people might often personally prefer to behave less emotionally and more analytically (Hsee & Rottenstreich, 2004; Kahneman, Donate Different p. 4 Ritov, & Schkade, 1999; Kahneman, Schkade, & Sunstein, 1998; Loewenstein, 1996; Loewenstein, Weber, Hsee, & Welch, 2001; Metcalfe & Mischel, 1999; Rottenstreich & Hsee, 2001; Slovic, 1987; Slovic, Finucane, Peters, & MacGregor, 2002), and sympathetic emotions might lead people to make decisions in ways they would rather not. The second is that because factors that arouse emotions may be independent of the objective severity of suffering, emotionally influenced decisions might produce decisions that are insensitive to—if not neglectful of—the objective scope of human suffering. Such “scope insensitivity” has garnered substantial research interest, as illustrated by three phenomena: the identifiable victim effect, psychophysical numbing, and recent research from our own lab on the immediacy bias in donation decisions. Identifiable Victims Among the clearest illustrations that sympathetic emotions influence donation decisions and contribute to scope insensitivity comes from research on the identifiable victim effect (Kogut & Ritov, 2005a, 2005b; Small & Loewenstein, 2003). There, people are more inclined to make donations that might alleviate the suffering of a specific, identified individual rather than a statistical group of individuals. In one study, for example, people gave more money to save the life of an ill child when they saw a picture of the child along with identifying information compared with receiving no picture or identifying information (Kogut & Ritov, 2005b). In another study, children were described as being treated in a medical center with their lives in danger and that money needs to be raised for a drug that cures their disease (Kogut & Ritov, 2005a). People were willing to contribute more money when they saw a picture of a single, identified child compared with a child who was not identified with a picture. Importantly, people were also willing to contribute more money when they saw the single identified victim compared with a group of eight identified victims. In these studies on identifiable victims, people donate more to single identified individuals than to groups of individuals—keenly illustrating insensitivity to the scope of human suffering, at least in terms of the number of victims suffering. The identifiable victim effect is largely attributable to the stronger sympathetic emotions evoked by an identifiable victim compared with an unidentifiable victim (Kogut & Ritov, 2005a). Because emotions are closely intertwined with immediate behavioral inclinations (Loewenstein, 1996; Metcalfe & Mischel, 1999), the emotionally evocative single, identified victim leads people to donate more than the abstract, less emotionally evocative statistical victims. This emotional analysis of the identifiable victim effect implies that making people aware of the effect and drawing people’s attention to information about the scope of human suffering would mitigate the identifiable victim effect, leading people to donate more to large groups of (statistical) victims than to single identifiable victims. Unfortunately this is not the case, for reasons reviewed next. Psychophysical Numbing There is mounting evidence that thinking and deciding in a calculating manner, as would seem to be required when processing information about the objective scope of human suffering, can directly undermine the sympathetic emotions that can lead people to make charitable donations. Slovic (2007) has characterized a process by which thinking about large scale numbers of suffering humans actively mitigates emotional Donate Different p. 5 reactions—a process he refers to as “psychophysical numbing”—such that people become more and more insensitive to increases in the scope of human suffering (Fetherstonhaugh, Slovic, Johnson, & Friedrich, 1997). For example, whereas there is a sharp increase in sympathetic emotions as the number of suffering humans increases from none to one, there is a proportionally smaller increase in sympathetic emotions as the number of suffering humans increases from one to two, from two to three, and so on. Moreover, as the number of suffering humans becomes exceptionally large—as in genocide, mass starvation, and other chronic crises—sympathetic emotions can actually dissipate such that people are less emotionally responsive to large scale suffering than to small scale suffering. One factor that contributes to psychophysical numbing is that people can move from valuing the outcomes of donation decisions in a primarily “hot,” emotional way to primarily a “cold,” calculating way (e.g. Hsee & Rottenstreich, 2004; Kahneman, 2003). These two modes of valuation—by feeling and by calculation—are distinct and somewhat incompatible. In one study, for instance, people were asked how much they would be willing to donate to rescue animals of an endangered species (pandas) in a remote Asian region (Hsee & Rottenstreich, 2004). The animals were represented by pictures, which was assumed to evoke primarily valuation by feeling, or by dots, which was assumed to evoke primarily valuation by calculation. When valuing by feeling, whether one or four animals was to be saved did not influence people’s donation decisions, indicating scope insensitivity. In contrast, when valuing by calculation, people were willing to donate more to save four than to save one animal, indicating scope sensitivity. Thus, people were insensitive to scope when valuing by feeling, but not when valuing by calculation. Together, research on psychophysical numbing and on valuation by feeling versus calculation yields the controversial and somewhat troubling prediction that increasing scope sensitivity by encouraging people to attend and give weight to information about the objective scope of human suffering may actually undermine people’s willingness to donate by undermining sympathetic emotions. Preliminary support for this suggestion comes from a series of experiments in which participants in a study of the identifiable victim effect were informed about the effect, and admonished to avoid it (Small, Loewenstein, & Slovic, 2007). In response to learning about the identifiable victim effect, participants who were forewarned about it and encouraged to avoid it decreased, rather than increased, the amount they donated; the behavior of participants in the statistical victim condition was unchanged. This pattern suggests that encouraging people to be on guard against biased behavior, which may encourage them to decide in a more calculating way, undermined their emotionally induced desire to donate. The results of research on the identifiable victim effect, psychophysical numbing, and valuation by feeling versus calculation indicates that people donate more to alleviate emotionally evocative than non-evocative human suffering, but that informing people about this tendency may undermine their overall likelihood of donating. Given this conclusion, those in the business of persuading people to donate might consider encouraging people to think more emotionally about large scale suffering rather than encouraging people to think in a more calculating way about human suffering. Indeed, the role of attention and mental imagery are important psychological contributors Donate Different p. 6 to increased emotional reactions to single identified victims or victims that are similar to the perceiver (Dickert & Slovic, 2009; Loewenstein & Small, 2007; Slovic, 2007). Making it easy for people to mentally imagine and to focus their attention on victims in large scale suffering might facilitate emotional reactions, for example, by raising awareness of the 38,000 annual handgun deaths represented by piling up 38,000 pairs of shoes, or by helping comprehend the magnitude of the holocaust by displaying a collection of six million paper clips, with each clip representing the loss of one life (Schroeder & Schroeder-Hildebrand, 2004; both examples described by Slovic, 2007). Research conducted in our lab, however, indicates that even when large scale human suffering is conveyed in an emotionally evocative way, people still exhibit a disproportionate response to human suffering that happens to arouse immediate rather than previous emotions, which can contribute to scope insensitivity.