Identifying a single victim can increase willingness to donate by up to 36%

Identifiable Victim Effect: the increased likelihood that we contribute to causes where we know about specific, identifiable individuals compared to groups of unidentified victims, as a result of greater empathy being evoked. Identifying factors can range from a name, to personal details, to a photo. 

Altruism: the practice of making sacrifices (which can be financial) for other people’s benefit, and our degree of altruism can be impacted by a variety of factors. 

Empathy Altruism Hypothesis: a theory that our willingness to help is motivated by an aroused empathic emotion within us. 

Affect Heuristic: describes our tendency to rely on our emotions when making decisions instead of concrete, factual information, which can make us deviate from rationality. 

Affective Process: when our biological system triggers an action or behavior based on a response to a new stimulus.

Risk as Feelings: our tendency to be overly influenced by feelings such as worry, fear, or anxiety that arouse strong emotions and cause us to make decisions that deviate from the best course of action.

The role of emotions

While it is widely accepted today that emotions can disproportionately influence the decisions we make, this hasn’t always been the case. Prior to behavioral science insights, academics hypothesized that people made decisions that were rational and objective. Drawing on insights from the late 1990s and early 2000s, the researchers wanted to explore the affective process and the affect heuristic to see how an emotional response factors in when it comes to donations. 

The identifiable victim effect

The insight that people respond more emotionally to individual lives than statistics was first proposed by economist Thomas Schelling in 1964 and later studied by George Lowenstein and Deborah Small. Lowenstein and Small found that people were more likely to contribute money towards an identified victim than towards a non-identifiable victim. For example, if you were told that your money would go towards helping Sarah, a 12-year old quadriplegic, you would be more likely to donate than if you were told your money would go towards someone who is quadriplegic. 

Putting yourself in their shoes

While Lowenstein and Small had hypothesized that the reason behind the identifiable victim effect was due to aroused emotions, the researchers wanted to demonstrate a relationship between the identifiable victim effect and the empathy altruism hypothesis more directly. To empathize with someone, you must be able to put yourself in their shoes and adopt their perspective. Kogut and Ritov suggested that it is easier to do so when you can identify the victim, as you have more details that you can try and relate to. 

Additionally, the researchers realized that oftentimes, identifiable victims are also discussed in singularities. The way that humans process individuals and groups is different, which could be a factor behind the identifiable victim effect. Kogut and Ritov therefore wanted to see whether the identifiable victim effect would happen for groups as well. 

The researchers conducted three different studies in order to demonstrate links between the different behavioral science concepts, such as the identifiable victim effect, the empathy altruism hypothesis, and the different cognitive process that occurs when we encounter individuals.

Study 1: Willingness to Contribute to the Identified Victim

To confirm the identifiable victim hypothesis, participants were assigned to one of eight conditions. Half of the conditions asked participants to read a story which described a singular sick child, with varying degrees of identifying details (unidentified; age only ; age & name; age, name & picture). The other four conditions asked participants to read a similar story which described a group of sick children, with the same varying degrees of identifying details. They were told the child/children needed a drug to cure their disease, but that since the drug was very expensive, they needed to raise money. Participants were asked whether they were willing to contribute money to save the child/children and how much money they would donate. 

Study 2: Role of empathic emotions

To determine the difference in aroused emotion depending on victims being identified vs unidentified and singular vs group, the second study asked participants to rate their feelings of distress and concern after reading a story about a sick child/children. Participants were once again placed into one of eight conditions, and after disclosing their willingness to contribute, they were asked about their feelings of distress and concern. The first question asked about their feelings of anxiety and distress, to see if the risk as feelings phenomenon would occur, and the second asked about sympathy and compassion. 

Study 3: Show me the money

The first two studies asked participants whether they would, theoretically, contribute money to the cause. However, when the contribution is no longer hypothetical, the researchers wanted to see whether the single identifiable victim effect would still occur. When asked to actually spend money, participants could be influenced by economic rationality. Participants were placed in one of the same eight conditions, read the same story, were given an opportunity to donate money, and were then asked to disclose their responses to the same answers about emotional arousal. 

The 4E Framework

The researchers wanted to investigate how people’s behavior could be influenced by providing more incentives and/or emotions, in the hopes of influencing socially beneficial behavior. The 4E Framework suggests that interventions that seek a desired outcome, such as persuading individuals to donate to good causes, should enable, encourage, engage, and exemplify. In the instance of the identifiable victim effect, donating-behavior is primarily encouraged and engaged through the use of greater detail and positioning the cause effectively. 

Singular versus groups

The studies revealed that identifying factors greatly impacted participants’ willingness to contribute when it came to a story about a singular victim, but that having greater identifying information on a group of victims did not have a significant impact on people’s willingness to contribute. Whereas the difference in willingness to contribute between participants who read the story about a singular, unidentifiable victim and a singular, identifiable victim with name, age, and picture was 36.73, the difference in willingness to contribute to a unidentified group of eight compared to an identified group of eight with names, ages, and pictures was only 0.63, with people actually more willing to contribute to the unidentified group of eight than the identified group of 8. 

Distress over empathy

The second and third studies also revealed that feelings of anxiety and distress motivated individuals’ willingness to contribute, but feelings of empathy had a less significant impact. People felt most distressed for identifiable, singular, victims and were thus most likely to donate in that condition. Overall, more distress was felt for singular victims. In terms of rational theory, it does not make sense that people would be more distressed for one individual in need than a group of individuals, which shows the strong influence emotions have on our decisions. The fact that distress was more correlated to willingness to contribute suggests in part, our willingness to contribute is motivated by our desire to shed anxious feelings, supporting the risk as feelings hypothesis. 

Charities, non-profit organizations, and governments would all promote donating-behavior, as it can help a variety of causes that need society’s attention. Researching how best to promote that behavior -  by ensuring to contextualize the situation in the way that leads to the greatest emotional response to increase willingness to contribute -  

• The results of the studies have positive implications for society as a whole by providing insight into how to get people to be willing to contribute to those in need.
• The study ensured privacy of participants by not disclosing any identifying details, and did not use stories of real children in need. 
• Researchers did not consider whether or not it is ethical to share victims’ identity in real life, which could be an obstacle to the effectiveness of the identifiable victim effect.

Cognitive Biases Stop Us From Donating Effectively

Although people can be very charitable, oftentimes, money is not dispersed in the most effective way which results in thousands of people dying from preventable diseases because they do not have the resources to treat them. In order to achieve more social good, our contributor Julian Hazell explores some of the cognitive biases that influence our charitable giving and provides solutions to the distance bias and the identifiable victim bias.

Charity, Parochialism, and the Inefficiencies of Altruism

One of the mistakes we make in our charitable giving is that we tend to give money to well-known organizations and charities. This is because they are well broadcasted and a large group of people become aware of them. However, it is actually the less well-known charities that need our help most. This article explores why we make that mistake, as well as other errors in efficiency such as giving a small amount of money to several charities instead of a bigger sum to a singular charity. 

Precomitting Increases Donations

A different approach to motivating people to donate is to try and get them to commit beforehand. The commitment bias describes our desire to stay true to the promises we have made and be consistent with previous commitments, which can influence us to continue to donate to a cause. Read more about the relationship between commitment and donation in this article. 

Why Overheads Go Over Our Heads

We shy away from donating to causes if we know there are overhead costs and not all of the money we are donating will go directly to the people it is intended to help. Rationally, we should not care about the overhead costs, we should care about the efficiency of the organization at helping people. In this article, our contributor Arash Sharma considers two different nudges to get people to make smarter decisions when it comes to charitable donations: seed money and matching.