Rage donations and mobilization: Understanding the effects of advocacy on collective giving responses

Abstract

Advocacy is intended to change people's attitudes and behavior. Yet the psychological and behavioral consequences of advocacy have rarely been considered. Across 3 experiments (combined N = 934) in the contexts of debates around racial discrimination and abortion, we investigated if and how exposure to advocacy can influence collective giving responses: self-reported willingness to make donations congruent with one's beliefs on the issue and actual giving behavior. Reading tweets from one's own side of a contentious debate sometimes indirectly mobilized collective giving responses by enhancing perceptions of efficacy and ensuring people empathized and identified with highlighted victim groups. Simultaneously, however, supporting advocacy sometimes inadvertently suppressed action by reducing anger and perceived injustice. Results therefore show that advocacy can simultaneously mobilize and demobilize support. However, effects were not found consistently across contexts and donation measures. Overall, mobilization pathways were stronger, especially on donation behavior and in the context of the abortion debate. Results suggest advocacy can work broadly as intended: by influencing the attitudes and behaviors of audience members. Online

Charitable Triad Theory: How donors, beneficiaries, and fundraisers influence charitable giving

“…Donors can be motivated by the possibility of receiving emotional benefits (O'Brien & Kassirer, 2019) or material rewards (e.g., thank you gifts or tax rebates; Duquette, 2016; Holmes et al, 2002). Donor emotions also influence giving, including guilt, compassion, gratitude, anger, happiness, disgust, regret, and sadness (e.g., Basil et al, 2008; Chapman et al, 2022; Kemp et al, 2013; Liang et al, 2016; Polman & Ruttan, 2012). Finally, people's identities influence their giving decisions (e.g., Chapman et al, 2020; Kaikati et al, 2017; Kessler & Milkman, 2018), especially when their identities evoke supportive social norms (e.g., Croson et al, 2010; Latour & Manrai, 1989; Nook et al, 2016).…”

Ctrl-Shift: How Privacy Sentiment Changed from 2019 to 2021

“…While our work cannot draw causal conclusions, we note the presidential election -in which Republican candidate Donald Trump finished his term and was succeeded by Democratic candidate Joe Biden [5] -that occurred before our third round of data collection as a possible reason for the stark decrease in acceptance in government and law enforcement data uses among Republicans. We hypothesize that -like gun sales and donations to particular causes -views on data uses by governments may relate not to sentiments toward "the government" at large, but rather to fear of what the opposing party [29] may do with their data. If so, changes in privacy sentiment -which significantly influence legislation such as that around government data uses like end-to-end encryption [31,108] -may be easily predictable.…”

“…Partisanship is among the strongest predictors of attitudes toward topics ranging from public health-related attitudes and behaviors during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic [47,60] to perceptions of fairness in algorithmic decision-making [59]. People's behaviors are also known to cycle in tangent with presidential terms at a partisan level [29]; for instance, gun sales increase during Democratic presidential terms [41] and donations to women's health and progressive law organizations increase during Republican presidential terms [27,153].…”

We Usually Give Like This: Social Norms Describe Typical Charitable Causes Supported by Group Members

“…As has previously been theorized (see Chapman et al, 2018), these normative causes seem to reflect group priorities and goals. Campaigns which make explicit the connections between group priorities and preferred charitable responses could therefore shift group norms over time (see also Chapman, Lizzio-Wilson, et al, 2022). This represents a further opportunity for future research on norms and charity selection.…”