Unit Asking

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.

Happy to help—if it’s not too sad: The effect of mood on helping identifiable and unidentifiable victims

“…They found that while engaging in a deliberative mode of thought decreases contributions to single victims, it does not increase contributions to entire groups of victims. That said, Hsee and colleagues [65] did find that asking donors to specify the amount needed to help one individual in a group or crowd of people in need, just before asking them to decide how much to donate to help the entire group, increased donations to the group as a whole. Similarly, increasing the unity of a group by making it look more like a single entity than a group of many individuals [66] can boost the role played by emotions in decisions about the group.…”

Compassion Fade: Affect and Charity Are Greatest for a Single Child in Need

“…Recent research suggests that the singularity effect may be used to boost giving. Hsee et al [60] found that merely asking donors to indicate a hypothetical amount for helping one needy person, before asking donors to decide how much to donate for all of those in need, increased donations for the group.…”

The preference for distributed helping.

“…However, other possible reasons may exist. For instance, viewing one unpacked request may nudge helpers to become more scope-sensitive to the needs of other requests in subsequent donation decisions (e.g., unit asking, Hsee, Zhang, Lu, & Xu, 2013). Regardless of the exact reason why unpacking requests increases the donation amount, our research provides one way to reconcile conflicting findings about the relationship between the number of requesters and the amount of donations.…”