Psychology of Charitable Giving

Overview

• The empirical psychology of charitable giving - why people give (or don't). Distinct from fundraising-and-donor-psychology (which covers what to DO given they might give) and from psychology-of-charitable-giving being about the underlying motives. [source]
• Core motives: Andreoni's warm-glow / impure-altruism model (people give partly for the utility of giving itself, not only for the outcome). [source]
• The identifiable victim effect and singularity: Small, Loewenstein, and Slovic's work - one identifiable child gets more donation than statistics on many. Compassion fade / psychic numbing / pseudoinefficacy - help drops as the number of victims rises, because "helping any one of them feels like a drop in the bucket." [source]
• Empathy-altruism vs egoism debate: Batson's empathy-altruism hypothesis vs Cialdini's negative-state-relief counter-account. [source]
• The martyrdom effect (Olivola and Shafir - willingness to give rises when the pledge requires personal suffering). [source]
• Overhead aversion: donor rejection of gifts that pay for overhead rather than programs (Gneezy, Keenan, and Gneezy). [source]
• Moral identity (Aquino and Reed) and parochial altruism (in-group preference). [source]
• Prosocial framing: EPPM applied to donation, narrative vs statistics message framing, emotion appeals. [source]
• Nudge caveats: Mertens 2022 meta-analysis and the Maier et al. Bayesian reanalysis; the choice-architecture literature is real but overstated in some meta-analyses. [source]