Giving to Organizations that Help People in Need: Differences Across Denominational Identities

This article uses multiple‐year data to examine charitable giving to organizations that help people in need of food, shelter, or other basic necessities. Families that give to basic necessity organizations in any single year are a mix of occasional givers and regular givers. Controlling for family characteristics that affect giving, giving to basic necessity organizations does not vary across Christian denominations and nonaffiliated families in any notable way. However, Jewish families are both more likely to give and, when they do give, give larger amounts. Given recent policy interest in how churches, synagogues, and mosques help with the voluntary provision of a safety net for people in need, the results draw attention to the importance of a research agenda focused on the differences between occasional givers and regular givers and on explaining why Jewish families give more to organizations that help people in need.     

A FURTHER TEST OF A MODEL OF SELF-REFLECTION WITH CHILDREN AGES 10 AND 11

The hypothesis that self and others will be assigned to the same poles of bipolar constructs (e.g., generous - stingy ) with a relative frequency of 0.625, and three related predictions derived from Adams-Webber's (1997) model of self-reflection, were tested with a sample of 163 children (88 girls, 75 boys) ranging in age from 10 to 11. All participants completed repertory grids in which they evaluated themselves and 11 personal acquaintances on the basis of 12 bipolar constructs. The results for children aged 11 were consistent with all of the predictions of the model and with previous findings for older participants; however, those for 10-year-old children showed several significant differences with possible developmental implications in terms of personal construct theory.     

The Vulnerability of Giving: Ethics and the Generosity of Receiving

ABSTRACT

In this article, I describe how the interchange of giving and receiving is centrally implicated in the developmental/ethical journey from holding on to oneself toward a receptive embrace of a different Other. Since people’s lives are shaped by an inherent passion of offering one’s expressive contributions to the larger world, the challenge of the ethical turn requires a generous humility of receiving what others have to offer. When an individual has attained a sense of belonging because of being received himself/herself by significant persons, he/she is better able to mobilize the graciousness of welcoming the gifts of others. Finally, I emphasize the clinical import of the therapist being sufficiently open as a person so as to provide the patient with the opportunity and dignity to give of himself/herself as well.     

Principle of Care and Giving to Help People in Need

Theories of moral development posit that an internalized moral value that one should help those in need—the principle of care—evokes helping behaviour in situations where empathic concern does not. Examples of such situations are helping behaviours that involve cognitive deliberation and planning, that benefit others who are known only in the abstract, and who are out‐group members. Charitable giving to help people in need is an important helping behaviour that has these characteristics. Therefore we hypothesized that the principle of care would be positively associated with charitable giving to help people in need, and that the principle of care would mediate the empathic concern–giving relationship. The two hypotheses were tested across four studies. The studies used four different samples, including three nationally representative samples from the American and Dutch populations, and included both self‐reports of giving (Studies 1–3), giving observed in a survey experiment (Study 3), and giving observed in a laboratory experiment (Study 4). The evidence from these studies indicated that a moral principle to care for others was associated with charitable giving to help people in need and mediated the empathic concern–giving relationship. © 2016 The Authors. European Journal of Personality published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of European Association of Personality Psychology     

Universality and context-specificity in early executive function development

A renewed interest in early executive function (i.e., EF or the conscious control of thought and behavior) development has led several research groups to suggest that EF may be emerging and is less coordinated (e.g., showing few relations between tasks) in the first few years (Devine et al., 2019; Gago Galvagno et al., 2021; Johansson et al., 2016; Miller & Marcovitch, 2015; Ribner et al., 2022). This potentially universal development in EF does not exclude the possibility that EF may also differ across context (e.g., Gago Galvagno et al., 2021; Lohndorf et al., 2019; Tran et al., 2015) reflecting unique strengths and development built within one’s sociocultural environment. The present paper explores potential universal and context-specific early EF developments by focusing on three aims: (1) reviewing work on EF within the first two years of life that may speak to potential universality in the measurement, structure, growth, stability, and conceptualization of early EF (2) reviewing research that may speak to how the sociocultural context may play a role in context-specific development within early EF and (3) examining potential developmental EF frameworks for understanding universal and context-specific developments of early EF within context.     

Some but not all dispreferred turn markers help to interpret scalar terms in polite contexts

In polite contexts, people find it difficult to perceive whether they can derive scalar inferences from what others say (e.g., does “some people hated your idea” mean that not everyone hated it?). Because this uncertainty can lead to costly misunderstandings, it is important to identify the cues people can rely on to solve their interpretative problem. In this article, we consider two such cues: Making a long Pause before the statement, and prefacing the statement with Well. Data from eight experiments show that Pauses are more effective than Wells as cues to scalar inferences in polite contexts—because they appear to give a specific signal to switch expectations in the direction of bad news, whereas Well appears to give a generic signal to make extra processing effort. We consider the applied value of these findings for human–human and human–machine interaction, as well as their implications for the study of reasoning and discourse.     

The "Instrumentality" Heuristic: Why Metacognitive Difficulty Is Desirable During Goal Pursuit

ABSTRACT— The literature overwhelmingly demonstrates that feelings of ease are good and that objects that are easy to process are much liked. We propose, and demonstrate across three experiments, that this is not the case when people are pursuing a goal. This is because people pursuing a goal (e.g., "become kinder") usually invest efforts in whichever means (e.g., donate to a particular charity) they perceive as most instrumental for attaining their goal. Consequently, in their minds there is a correspondence between instrumentality of a means and feelings of effort. This correspondence becomes reversed in people's minds during goal pursuit, and they also come to view an object that is associated with feelings of effort rather than ease as more instrumental for goal attainment and consequently more desirable. When an object is not a means to fulfill an accessible goal, or when goals relating to the means are not accessible, subjective feelings of ease improve evaluation, as found in previous research on ease of processing.     

Giving from a distance: Putting the charitable organization at the center of the donation appeal

Past research has shown repeatedly that people prefer donating to a single identified human victim rather than to unidentified or abstract donation targets. In the current research we show results countering the identifiable victim effect, wherein people prefer to donate to charitable organizations rather than to an identifiable victim. In a series of five studies, we manipulate temporal and social distance, examine a variety of donation targets, and measure intention to donate time or money as well as actual donations of money. We show that people are more willing to donate to a charitable organization when they are temporally or socially distant from the population in need. Willingness to donate to a specific person in need is higher when donors are temporally or socially close to the donation target. Furthermore, we demonstrate that (a) empathy mediates donations to a single victim, yet does not mediate donations to charitable organizations; (b) that donation giving to charitable organizations is unique and is not similar to donations to a group of victims. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.     

助推爱心：利用默认选项促进捐赠行为

本研究采用实验室和现场实验的方法检验了默认选项的助推策略是否能够促进慈善捐赠行为。结果发现：（1）相较于把被试费的“保留选项”设置为默认,把“捐献选项”设置为默认时,被试捐献的概率和金额更高;（2）在多个捐款选项情景中,默认选项的设置总体上提高了默认选项被选择的概率;将最大金额选项设置为默认选项有助于提高被试平均捐赠额。这些发现表明,应用默认选项的助推策略能够有效促进人们的捐赠行为。本研究结果对减少募捐成本、提高募捐效率有所启示。     

Evidence for a relationship between trait gratitude and prosocial behaviour

Prosocial behaviour towards unrelated others is communally beneficial but can be individually costly. The emotion of gratitude mitigates this cost by encouraging direct as well as “upstream” reciprocity, thereby facilitating cooperation. A widely used method for measuring trait gratitude is the Gratitude Questionnaire (GQ6) [McCullough, M., Emmons, R., &; Tsang, J. (2002). The grateful disposition: A conceptual and empirical topography. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 82, 112–127. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.82.1.112]. Here we undertake an assessment of the external validity of the GQ6 by examining its relationship with two incentivized economic games that serve as face valid indices of generosity and reciprocity. In two studies (total N?=?501) we find that trait gratitude as measured by the GQ6 predicts greater donations in a charity donation task as well as greater transfers and returns in an incentivized trust game. These results support the hypothesis that individuals with higher trait gratitude are more generous and trusting on average, and provide initial evidence as to the predictive validity of the GQ6.     

Where to seat the applicant? How spatial distance influences the effect of self‐promotion on interviewer evaluations

In high‐stakes contexts such as job interviews, people seek to be evaluated favorably by others and they attempt to accomplish such favorable judgments particularly through self‐promotional behaviors. We sought to examine the persuasiveness of job candidates’ self‐promotion by examining job applicants’ subjective hireability from the perspective of construal‐level theory. Construal‐level theory states that perceptions occur from different levels of psychological distance (i.e., distal vs. proximal). This distance is created by other dimensions of distance (e.g., spatial or social distance) and affects how individuals construe incoming information. From a large distance, people more readily process abstract information, whereas from a close distance, people more readily process concrete information. Specifically, construal compatibility occurs when abstract versus concrete features of a stimulus match the psychological distance experienced by message‐recipients. Construal compatibility (vs. incompatibility) makes evaluations (e.g., of messages) more favorable. To apply this principle to self‐promotion, we created self‐promotional videos of a job interview, in which the applicant sat either far away from or close to the hiring manager (manipulating psychological distance); the applicant, then, used either direct or indirect self‐promotion (manipulating message construal level). The results showed participants reported stronger intention to hire the applicant when distance matched (vs. did not match) the type of self‐promotion the applicant used.     

Can a Robot Lie? Exploring the Folk Concept of Lying as Applied to Artificial Agents

The potential capacity for robots to deceive has received considerable attention recently. Many papers explore the technical possibility for a robot to engage in deception for beneficial purposes (e.g., in education or health). In this short experimental paper, I focus on a more paradigmatic case: robot lying (lying being the textbook example of deception) for nonbeneficial purposes as judged from the human point of view. More precisely, I present an empirical experiment that investigates the following three questions: (a) Are ordinary people willing to ascribe deceptive intentions to artificial agents? (b) Are they as willing to judge a robot lie as a lie as they would be when human agents engage in verbal deception? (c) Do people blame a lying artificial agent to the same extent as a lying human agent? The response to all three questions is a resounding yes. This, I argue, implies that robot deception and its normative consequences deserve considerably more attention than they presently receive.     

Emotional selection in memes: the case of urban legends.

This article explores how much memes like urban legends succeed on the basis of informational selection (i.e., truth or a moral lesson) and emotional selection (i.e., the ability to evoke emotions like anger, fear, or disgust). The article focuses on disgust because its elicitors have been precisely described. In Study 1, with controls for informational factors like truth, people were more willing to pass along stories that elicited stronger disgust. Study 2 randomly sampled legends and created versions that varied in disgust; people preferred to pass along versions that produced the highest level of disgust. Study 3 coded legends for specific story motifs that produce disgust (e.g., ingestion of a contaminated substance) and found that legends that contained more disgust motifs were distributed more widely on urban legend Web sites. The conclusion discusses implications of emotional selection for the social marketplace of ideas.     

Modeling dating decisions in a mock swiping paradigm: An examination of participant and target characteristics

New online dating platforms, such as Tinder, are dramatically changing the context in which people seek romantic relationships. In these platforms, users select partners they are willing to start a conversation with by “swiping” on them. These platforms provide exciting possibilities for applying new methods to test how user (e.g., demographic, personality) and target/partner (e.g., attractiveness, race) factors predict attraction. Across four laboratory studies (total N = 2,679), target physical attractiveness and target race were the largest predictors of decisions in this hypothetical dating context, whereas user individual difference traits were poor predictors. The current studies provide substantive information about the factors that predict romantic attraction in the context of mobile-based dating applications.     

Buying/Selling Price Preference Reversals: Preference for Environmental Changes in Buying versus Selling Modes

Many studies have shown that the most people are willing to pay to obtain an object often is significantly less than the least they will accept to relinquish the object (i.e., selling prices tend to be higher than buying prices). Most tests of the buying/selling price discrepancy have elicited values either for everyday market items (e.g., mugs, candy bars) or for environmental changes (e.g., a decrease in air quality, a landfill clean-up). The literature indicates a possible interaction between buying/selling prices and commodity type; buying/selling price differences seem greater for environmental improvements than for market items. In other words, people show more relative preference for environmental improvements in selling modes than they do in buying modes. A significant difference in preference due to elicitation mode is commonly termed a "preference reversal." The four experiments presented here establish this new preference reversal and examine the reasons for it. The results from these studies provide information about the nature of preference reversals, the valuation process as a whole, and the unique problem of valuing complex and risky items such as environmental changes.     

When are social judgments made? Evidence for the spontaneousness of trait inferences

Do people make trait inferences, even without intentions or instructions, at the encoding stage of processing behavioral information? Tulving's encoding specificity paradigm (Tulving & Thomson, 1973) was adapted for two recall experiments. Under memory instructions only, subjects read sentences describing people performing actions that implied traits. Later, subjects recalled each sentence under one of three cuing conditions: (a) a dispositional cue (e.g., generous), (b) a strong, nondispositional semantic associate to an important sentence word; or (c) no cue. Recall was best when cued by the disposition words. Subjects were unaware of having made trait inferences. Interpreted in terms of encoding specificity, these results indicate that subjects unintentionally made trait inferences at encoding. This suggests that attributions may be made spontaneously, as part of the routine comprehension of social events.     

Social Identity and Perceptions of Media Persuasion: Are We Always Less Influenced Than Others?1

People typically perceive negative media content (e.g., violence) to have more impact on others than on themselves (a third-person effect). To examine the perceived effects of positive content (e.g., public-service advertisements) and the moderating role of social identities, we examined students' perceptions of the impact of AIDS advertisements on self, students (in-group), nonstudents (out-group), and people in general. Perceived self-other differences varied with the salience of student identity. Low identifiers displayed the typical third-person effect, whereas high identifiers were more willing to acknowledge impact on themselves and the student in-group. Further, when influence was normatively acceptable within the in-group, high identifiers perceived self and students (us) as more influenced than nonstudents (them). The theoretical and practical implications of this reversal in third-person perceptions are discussed.     

The Martyrdom Effect: When Pain and Effort Increase Prosocial Contributions

Most theories of motivation and behavior (and lay intuitions alike) consider pain and effort to be deterrents. In contrast to this widely held view, we provide evidence that the prospect of enduring pain and exerting effort for a prosocial cause can promote contributions to the cause. Specifically, we show that willingness to contribute to a charitable or collective cause increases when the contribution process is expected to be painful and effortful rather than easy and enjoyable. Across five experiments, we document this “martyrdom effect,” show that the observed patterns defy standard economic and psychological accounts, and identify a mediator and moderator of the effect. Experiment 1 showed that people are willing to donate more to charity when they anticipate having to suffer to raise money. Experiment 2 extended these findings to a non‐charity laboratory context that involved real money and actual pain. Experiment 3 demonstrated that the martyrdom effect is not the result of an attribute substitution strategy (whereby people use the amount of pain and effort involved in fundraising to determine donation worthiness). Experiment 4 showed that perceptions of meaningfulness partially mediate the martyrdom effect. Finally, Experiment 5 demonstrated that the nature of the prosocial cause moderates the martyrdom effect: the effect is strongest for causes associated with human suffering. We propose that anticipated pain and effort lead people to ascribe greater meaning to their contributions and to the experience of contributing, thereby motivating higher prosocial contributions. We conclude by considering some implications of this puzzling phenomenon. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The emotional cost of charitable donations

Donations in support of a charitable cause can create a conflict between moral intuitions (e.g., fulfilling moral obligations and helping as many individuals in need as possible) and the cost entailed by following one's moral intuitions (e.g., spending money). The present paper investigates this conflict by putting people in a situation in which they must choose whether to help three women by giving more money or help one woman by giving less. In addition, the paper uses the attraction effect paradigm to counteract the single victim effect and reduce the conflict. Experiment 1 demonstrates that in a two-alternative context the majority of participants choose to help one woman by giving €150 instead of helping three women by giving €450. Experiment 2 replicates this finding and highlights the role of emotion regulation strategies in the management of the emotional conflict arising in the two-alternative condition. In both studies, the introduction of a third, dominated alternative reduces the conflict and makes it easier to choose the programme asking for a higher donation and helping three women. Implications for charitable donations and the role of the conflict between moral intuitions and economic costs are discussed.     

Make‐or‐Break: Chasing Risky Goals or Settling for Safe Rewards?

Humans regularly pursue activities characterized by dramatic success or failure outcomes where, critically, the chances of success depend on the time invested working toward it. How should people allocate time between such make‐or‐break challenges and safe alternatives, where rewards are more predictable (e.g., linear) functions of performance? We present a formal framework for studying time allocation between these two types of activities, and we explore optimal behavior in both one‐shot and dynamic versions of the problem. In the one‐shot version, we illustrate striking discontinuities in the optimal time allocation policy as we gradually change the parameters of the decision‐making problem. In the dynamic version, we formulate the optimal strategy—defined by a giving‐up threshold—which adaptively dictates when people should stop pursuing the make‐or‐break goal. We then show that this strategy is computationally inaccessible for humans, and we explore boundedly rational alternatives. We compare the performance of the optimal model against (a) a myopic giving‐up threshold that is easier to compute, and even simpler heuristic strategies that either (b) only decide whether or not to start pursuing the goal and never give up or (c) consider giving up at a fixed number of control points. Comparing strategies across environments, we investigate the cost and behavioral implications of sidestepping the computational burden of full rationality.