The devastation resulting from Hurricane Katrina has elicited unprecedented levels of charitable giving on the part of the general public. This event offers a unique opportunity to study many aspects of altruistic behavior, risk perceptions and risk attitudes, and the interaction between risk perceptions and attitudes and altruistic giving. Furthermore, the event offers the opportunity to study how such an event alters altruistic tendencies and risk perceptions and attitudes, and how these changes dissipate over time. We request funding under the SGER program because of the urgency of collecting data on perceptions and altruism as soon as possible after the disaster, before attitudes are changed by the passage of time. Our hypothesis is that perceptions of the probability of disasters and their potential cost are critical to the decision to donate. In this study we plan to use an established task-based measure of charitable giving used by the authors in previous studies, along with survey measures of sympathy, risk perceptions, and additional factors (such as experience) that might affect perceptions and/or charitable giving. This procedure will allow us to examine the impact of natural disasters on the magnitude and distribution (across charitable causes) of donations, and the mechanisms by which donations are affected.
The broader impacts of the study are theoretical and methodological. First, we expect to achieve a better understanding of the role of highly salient catastrophes in shaping perceptions of need and preferences for charitable giving. Experimental economists and economists more generally are concerned with this issue, since economic models of decision making rarely include the possibility of an impact of salience, but the impact of highly public events is clearly substantial. It is our hope that data such as ours will help to shape the development of better theories of altruistic behavior. Second, since our study involves the general public, part of our effort will focus on developing appropriate behavioral instruments for subjects that may not have the math literacy skills of the typical convenience sample of university students.
