There are more than 6 billion people inhabiting Planet Earth. About one billion of these enjoy a high standard of living unprecedented in human history, while another billion live in extreme poverty, subject to great risk from hunger, disease, natural disasters, and human malevolence. This research explores what motivates those in the wealthy world to contribute money and humanitarian aid to those in need. This research builds on psychological theory to test the effects of attention, imagery, trust, moods, emotions, and varying descriptions of the need. The project team also examines the importance and determiners of the warm glow of good feeling that occurs when one helps another in need.
Although there have been many studies of charitable giving and philanthropy during the past 20 years, many open questions remain. This project employs laboratory experiments, online surveys, and field studies to address questions such as the following:
* What is the psychological nature of warm glow: What is the experience? When is it experienced? How often? What is the duration of the experience and how does it influence subsequent decisions about donating? Can warm glow feelings be induced without the actual act of giving? * What factors mediate giving through warm glow, both to motivate and demotivate giving? How does the number of people in need influence warm glow? Are we deterred from aiding those people we can help by becoming aware of others we are not helping? * How might warm glow giving be modeled to incorporate the complex and dynamic interactions among many causal variables?
Previous research by these scholars in this area has already influenced the approaches that journalists and humanitarian aid organizations have taken to motivate people and their governments to do more to help others. The new research continues to inform those who are working to save lives and enhance the well being of the world's neediest people.
Project Outcomes Intellectual Merit The theoretical underpinning of our research involves the study of feelings, in particular positive and negative affect. Our own research and that of others has demonstrated that feelings play a major role in motivating behavior. In this project, we have focused on a particular positive feeling of satisfaction that one anticipates having when contemplating a charitable act and which subsequently may occur when carrying it out. Economists have characterized this feeling as warm glow. Specifically, we have been conducting empirical research to address the following questions: a. What is the psychological nature of warm glow? What is the experience? When is it experienced? How often? What is the duration of the experience and how does it influence subsequent decisions about donating? Can warm-glow feelings be induced without the actual act of giving? b. What factors mediate giving through warm glow, both to motivate and demotivate giving? How does the number of people in need and the representation of those who could be helped or not helped influence warm glow? Among the most important of our findings is a phenomenon we have labeled pseudoinefficacy. During the project, we have been conducting empirical studies on the possible role of warm glow in contributing to pseudoinefficacy. We have found that awareness of persons we cannot help reduces the anticipated warm glow of satisfaction associated with aiding those we can help. Moreover, in several studies we have found that negative feelings associated with persons not being helped often intrude upon and reduce warm glow, resulting in sharply reduced donations to those in need of aid. This is not rational. We should not be demotivated from providing help by the knowledge that we cannot help everyone in need. We have proposed methods to prevent this illusion of inefficacy from occurring. Broader Impacts Our research addresses questions fundamental to understanding what motivates people to provide charitable and humanitarian assistance to human beings in need. Our results can be used by aid organizations to motivate charitable giving. More generally, this research suggests ways to motivate people to mitigate harm from poverty, disease, violence, and environmental degradation.
