Compassion Week

From July 30 through August 3, 2018, Decision Research held its seventh annual conference titled “Compassion Week.”

Compassion Week provides scholars from around the world the opportunity to share their current research, learn from each other, and establish opportunities for future collaborations. Each scholar is engaged in the research of pro-social behavioral psychology. Their various research topics include compassion, empathy, altruism, emotion, introspection, decision making, charitable giving, climate change, humanitarian interventions, and nuclear war.

This year, 23 scholars joined us from Canada, Israel, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Each scholar paid for their own transportation and lodging, often using university and grant funds. Decision Research provided the conference space, refreshments, and travel assistance, such as arranging lodging and ground transportation.

Below are summaries of some of the presentations delivered at the conference:

Paul Slovic, Decision Research and the University of Oregon

The Caveman and the Bomb in the Digital Age

“The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophes.”

-Albert Einstein

No human decision is more fraught than one involving the use of nuclear weapons—a decision on which may ride the lives of millions of people and potentially the fate of civilization. Shortly after the dawn of the nuclear era, psychologists and other behavioral scientists began the empirical study of the cognitive and social factors influencing human decision making in the face of risk. The findings are worrisome, identifying numerous cognitive quirks and limitations that challenge the ability of our leaders to make rational decisions about using nuclear weapons. Implications of these troubling findings for strategic decisions and arms control were discussed.

Ari Kagan, Center for Advanced Hindsight, Duke University

Applying Donation Psychology to Effective Altruism

The effective altruism movement uses evidence and information to help people do as much good as possible with their donations, given limited resources. To do so, the effective altruism movement often relies heavily on information, such as charity evaluations and correcting common misperceptions around charitable giving, as a way to increase donation efficacy. However, information has often been found to be ineffective at changing beliefs and even less effective at changing behaviors. One study was presented which examines whether information is an effective way to correct common misperceptions around charitable giving and to change donation behavior. While the information helped reduce some of the misperceptions, it did little to shift actual donation behaviors. As a result, approaches grounded in behavioral psychology may be more effective at changing donation behavior. In line with this approach, a new startup app (Sparrow) was discussed which makes use of behavioral science to help people give to charity, by allowing users to tie events in their daily lives to automatic donations.

Stephan Dickert, Queen Mary University of London

Contribution in Context: The Effect of Status on Prosocial Decisions

We looked at the effect of asymmetrical status on donation decisions when two donors and one target (both a charity organization (Exp.1) as well individual recipients (Exp. 2–4)) are present. Results show that low status donors are willing to donate a higher percentage of their endowment than high status donors, but only in joint situations when paired with high status individuals where status differences are readily visible. Symmetrical pairing (low status individuals paired with other low status individuals) as well as making the donation decision public vs. private showed that the presence of another donor as well as social signaling cannot readily explain the effects.

Arvid Erlandsson, Linköping University, Sweden

Saved Lives Insensitivity and the Prominence Effect

Why do people sometimes prefer to help few rather than many victims? We let participants first read several helping dilemmas where they stated, e.g., how many outgroup-members that must be helped in Project A to make it equally attractive as Project B which could help 100 ingroup-members. Later, participants chose between the two equally attractive projects. Several helping dilemma attributes were prominent, meaning that they influenced preferences more in choice-tasks than in matching-tasks. To exemplify, although 72.5% expressed that ingroup- and outgroup-projects were equally valuable in the matching task, 93.5% of these supported the ingroup-project when forced to make a choice.

Emir Efendic, Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands

Self-Serving Justifications in Charitable Behaviors

Self-serving justifications are an important determinant of dishonest behaviour. Usually, researchers look at when people behave dishonestly for their own benefit, but one can also behave dishonestly when it leads to someone else’s benefit, say for instance, a charity. In a recent study, we show that people are indeed willing to cheat for the benefit of a charity, especially when the situation is ambiguous and tempting—thus the cheating is more easily justifiable. However, while people who show higher general prosociality tend to cheat more for the benefit of a charity, overall, people were equally likely to cheat for their own and the charity’s benefit, suggesting a certain tit-for-tat cheating behaviour.

Marijke Leliveld, University of Groningen, the Netherlands

Face Valence in Charity-Related Advertisements (with In Hye Kang & Rosie Ferraro)

In advertisements for charities and in those for companies selling products of which parts of the proceeds go to charity (so called cause-related marketing products; “CM”), very often the pictures of those in need are presented. In this project we find that although a sad face results in more distress towards the person in need and as a consequence increased willingness to donate or willingness or buy the CM product, it also results in another inferential process. We show that people infer from sad faces manipulative intent by the organization (holds for charities well as companies) which has a negative effect on ad and organization evaluation, and a negative effect on willingness to donate and willingness to buy the CM product.

Charity Ad Effectiveness on Social Media and Subsequent Donation Decisions (with Hans Risselada & Daniel Västjfäll)

We know quite a lot about charity ad effectiveness on (hypothetical) donation decisions, but much less about how these ads are effective on social media. Moreover, we don’t know how supporting an online petition spread via social media can influence decisions in subsequent donation requests of that same charity. This project discusses how we will be able to study this by collaborating with a lead generating company and a call center. One of the possibilities to study is whether there is a difference between using the word “help” vs. the word “support.” We provided some initial pilot data and discussed with the Compassion Week attendees the best ways to use this research opportunity.

How Donors Can Overcome Overhead Aversion (with Jan Willem Bolderdijk)

In this project we study why people are overhead averse. We show that people are averse towards charities which generously pay their employees (i.e., a taboo trade-off) even when this implies that the charity can raise more money. However, when the performance of the charity is described in sacred terms (number of lives saved) rather than secular terms (money raised per year) people are able to overcome overhead version.

Hajdi Moche, University of Linköping, Sweden

Are People Less Willing to Donate to Charity Causes When They Are Reminded of Other Ways They Could Spend Their Money?

The talk focused on two research questions: Are people less willing to donate to charity causes when they are reminded of other ways that they could spend their money? And are they less willing to help when the cause is abstract, with no identified victim to the cause? The preliminary result of the study that was presented seemed to indicate that people are almost as willing to donate even when reminded of alternative ways to spend their money. Also, there seemed to be no difference in willingness whether there was an identified victim or not.

Enrico Rubaltelli, University of Padova, Italy

Cost and Benefit in Funding a Bundle of Aid Programs (with Stephan Dickert, Marcus Mayorga, & Paul Slovic)

We demonstrated that people are more willing to fund a bundle of smaller aid programs rather than a single aid program corresponding to the overall donation amount (and number of lives helped) of the bundle. Critically, people perceived donating to the bundle as less costly than funding the single aid program, whereas the benefit for the people who received the help was perceived as similar in the two cases. We also discussed boundary conditions that can modulate such an effect.

Pär Bjälkebring, University of Gothenburg, Sweden

The Coupling of Prosocial Behaviors and Emotions in Everyday Life: Results from a One-Week Diary Study

The topic of the presentation was prosocial behaviors. Every night for seven days we had people report whether they did something prosocial in the last 24 hours. Our results showed that those who did the most prosocial acts were happier than those who did fewer.