Donate Different: External and Internal Influences on Emotion-Based Donation Decisions

Abstract

Emotions can influence charity donation decisions in ways that people and policy makers might prefer they did not. For example, our studies demonstrate that people who are exposed to a sequence of emotionally described humanitarian crises, donate more resources to crises that just happen to arouse immediate emotions - an “immediacy bias” that can lead to higher donations toward objectively less deadly crises. Two broad categories of interventions can mitigate influences of emotion on charitable donation decisions. Externally oriented interventions refer to cues, incentives, or decision structures imposed on people. For example, people who are exposed to a sequence of emotionally evocative descriptions of human suffering and who make charitable allocations after exposure to each cause are less inclined to exhibit an immediacy bias compared with people who make allocations after exposure to the entire sequence. Internally oriented interventions, in contrast, encourage mindful decision strategies aimed at reducing the immediacy bias in donation decisions. For example, inviting people to reflect on how much they think emotional and mortality information should influence allocation decisions decreases the influence of emotion and increases the influence of mortality information in donation decisions, particularly when people believe that mortality information should be given greater weight relative to emotional considerations. The distinction between externally versus internally oriented interventions has both theoretical implications for understanding how people monitor and correct emotional influences on their own decisions and practical implications for increasing the efficiency of charitable donations.