Compassion for All: Real-World Online Donations Contradict Compassion Fade

Abstract

People tend to donate more to help a single rather than a group of victims. However, recent studies were able to reverse this compassion fade effect by presenting people with multiple donation appeals with different victim group sizes (joint evaluation) instead of just one donation appeal (separate evaluation). Because practitioners often use the compassion fade effect to boost giving, the reversal of this effect in joint evaluation settings has important implications for fundraising. This study tests whether the reversed compassion fade effect can be replicated in the field by using data from the crowdfunding platform GoFundMe. When browsing projects on GoFundMe, people see multiple projects displayed at once, placing them in a joint evaluation context. I found a concave effect of the perceived victim group size on the amount of funds raised, the number of donations received, and the size of the average donation received by a project.