Want to Spark Charity? Try Appealing to Both the Head and the Heart
Eda Erensoy 
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Prevailing wisdom dictates that emotion – and not reason – motivates people to give money toward important social causes. But a recent study by Matthew Lindauer and colleagues calls this into question. The study finds that rational appeals in the form of philosophical arguments are as effective as emotional appeals in persuading people to make charitable donations.
Around the world, nonprofits have collected charitable donations using emotional appeals. The practice of appealing to donors commonly involves telling the story of an identifiable victim alongside a photo. Studies have shown that these kinds of direct, emotional appeals are more effective in motivating people to donate than appeals focusing on “statistical victims,” (i.e., the total number of people in need) – and a form of rational appeal. Providing such statistics has been found to actually reduce donations when provided in addition to stories of identifiable victims. This evidence has led to the assumption that rational appeals are poor motivators for charitable giving.
Lindauer et al. set out to test this assumption by comparing the effects of different appeals on study participants’ willingness to donate to children in severe poverty. In particular, they wondered whether a rational argument might work if it was based around a philosophical argument rather than statistics. They showed participants one of five appeal conditions: emotional, philosopical, combined emotional-first, and combined philosophical-first, or no appeal as a control. Next, participants were told they would be included in a prize drawing for $100 and asked what percentage of their potential prize money they would choose to donate based on the appeals they had read.
All appeal conditions resulted in higher donations than the control condition, but Lindauer et al.’s data suggests that both emotional and rational appeals have a significantly positive impact on charitable giving. The combined philosophical-first appeal performed best, but only slightly better than the emotional appeal alone. The combined emotional-first appeal performs slightly worse than the emotional appeal alone. However, these differences are not statistically significant. Including a philosophical argument does not weaken an emotional appeal.
Across different appeal conditions, the donation amount was significantly correlated with measures of upset, sympathy for children in poverty, closeness, moral responsibility, and perceived efficacy. It follows that both rational appeals that use logical persuasion and emotional appeals targeting an emotional state can evoke the same affective responses that motivate increased donations.
However, the effects are not identical. Emotional appeals, the authors note, have a short-term impact that “would seem to work primarily on people’s immediate emotional affect, which is subject to depletion based on repeated exposure and over time” (Lindauer et al. 2020, 418). On the other hand, rational arguments could result in long-term behavior change by convincing people to change their values and beliefs.
The work of Lindauer et al. can guide non-governmental organizations in how they design campaigns to promote charitable giving. Their findings provide evidence against the belief that rational appeals inevitably dampen the effectiveness of emotional appeals. Rational appeals could be especially promising in producing long-term changes in behavior, though the authors call for further research to establish these effects. By guiding people to think about charitable giving as a virtue and an ethical responsibility, rational appeals combined with emotional appeals can help form a collective response to crises such as global poverty and climate change.
Lindauer, Matthew, Marcus Mayorga, Joshua Greene, Paul Slovic, Daniel Västfjäll, and Peter Singer. 2020. “Comparing the Effect of Rational and Emotional Appeals on Donation Behavior.” Judgment and Decision Making 15, no. 3 (May): 413–420. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/5wjuv.
