How does social information affect charitable giving?: Empathic concern promotes support for underdog recipient

Abstract

Charitable giving represents a unique cooperative characteristic of humans. In today's environment with social media, our charitable decisions seem to be influenced by social information such as a project's popularity. Here we report three experiments that examined people's reactions to social information about a charitable endeavor and their psychophysiological underpinnings. Participants were first solicited to make donations to either the Africa or Syria project of UNICEF. Then participants were provided an opportunity to learn social information (i.e., how much each project had raised from previous participants) and change their decision if desired. Contrary to expectation, participants who learned that their initial preferences were consistent with the majority of previous participants' choices exhibited a sizable tendency to switch to the less popular project in their final choices. This anti-conformity pattern was robust across the three experiments. Eye-tracking data (gaze bias and pupil dilation) indicated that these "Changers" were more physiologically aroused and formed more differential valuations between the two charity projects, compared to "Keepers" who retained their initial preferences after viewing the social information. These results suggest that social information about relative popularity may evoke empathic concern for the worse-off target, in line with the human tendency to avoid unequal distributions.

The Effect of Expressive Biosignals on Empathy and Closeness for a Stigmatized Group Member

“…Given that we did not observe significant effects on empathic concern, this aligns with prior work about empathic concern and its related effects [7,8]. Additionally, our analysis yielded a mean of $0.22 in donations, 7% of the amount they could donate (their payment for the task), as compared to 13% in the low empathy condition in Batson's original study [7], or roughly 10% in some studies on charitable giving [59,60]. This is potentially due to limitations in our donation measure.…”

Giving behavior and social decision-making in the age of conscious capitalism: A case for neuroscience

“…Additionally, moral emotions such as guilt, indignation, and compassion are present (Balconi, 2020). Moreover, social information about the relative popularity of a need may evoke an empathetic concern for the most disadvantaged target, consistent with the human tendency to avoid unequal distributions (Saito et al, 2019). One element that comes overwhelmingly into play is social reward.…”

A new typology of psychological mechanisms underlying prosocial decisions

“…Many studies include one or several types of emotional reactions as a possible psychological mechanism underlying helping (e.g. Bagozzi & Moore, 1994;Fisher & Ma, 2014;Graziano et al, 2007;Kogut & Ritov, 2005b;Pagano & Huo, 2007;Pavey et al, 2012;Pfattheicher et al, 2020;Saito et al, 2019;Västfjäll, et al 2014). Empathic concern has been found to predict helping rather well in many situations but less well in other situations.…”