How priming affected donation amounts by 96%

Identifiable victim effect - The tendency to feel more sympathy and a greater urge to help victims of a tragedy when one or a few people are at the center. 

Affect heuristic - Emotion-driven decision-making, rather than relying on concrete information. This is a quicker, automatic thought system than the more analytical alternative. 

Priming - Exposure to a stimulus, like a word, that influences a person’s response or decision making, usually without them being aware of it. 

Framing - The way information is presented, or framed, that influences how we perceive or process it. 

Charities struggle to raise enough money for worthy causes that affect thousands of victims, while by comparison individual victims elicit much greater generosity. This is known as the ‘identifiable victim effect’; they stimulate a more powerful emotional response than the vague concept of a large group of people. A famous example is “Baby Jessica” who fell into a well. People sent over $700,000 for her rescue. Comparatively, statistical victims - though equally deserving and more numerous - are difficult to imagine and therefore hard to feel sympathy for.  

Heart beats brain

Identifiability evokes the affect heuristic, part of a dual cognitive system which is driven by emotional, and more automatic than its counterpart, analytical mode. 

Related to the issue of identifiability related to charity is the “proportion of reference group effect”, the tendency to judge tragic events on a scale of proportion rather than absolutes. For example, an event that results in 10 deaths in a community of 200 is a disaster, while generally the same number of deaths in a community of a million is not. 

Researchers, Small, Loewenstein, and Slovic hypothesized that thinking analytically about the value of lives would reduce donations to an identifiable victim, but have no impact on giving to statistical victims. Across four studies, participants completed a short survey on their technology habits in exchange for $5.00. After completing the survey, the participant was invited to make a donation to the Save the Children charity. 

 MINDSPACE

Their interventions were informed by the MINDSPACE Framework, a mnemonic that captures nine behavior drivers, also including Messenger, Incentives, Norms, Defaults, Salience, Commitments, and Ego. Priming manipulated an analytical or emotional thought processing mode, while affect tapped into subjects’ natural tendency to rely on feelings to make quick decisions. 

Teaching about identifiability

Each participant received a description of either a little girl, or a broad description of the problem of starvation in Africa. The intervention taught half of the participants about the identifiability effect, and how it impacts donations.

Reframing the intervention

To rule out the potential for the framing of the identifiability effect impacting the results of study 1 too heavily, for the second study researchers framed the problem in the opposite way. For example, the lesson about identifiability was rephrased from ‘people give more to identifiable victims’ to ‘people give less to statistical victims’. 

Subtly seeding identifiability

Where studies 1 and 2 explicitly drew attention to identifiability, study 3 was more subtle. Study three gave participants three donation options: donation to an identifiable victim; to statistical victims; or an identifiable victim with statistical information. 

Analytical vs. emotional

The final study did not educate participants about identifiability, instead priming calculation-based, or feeling-based thought. After completing the survey, half of the subjects received a series of math problems, priming analytical thought. The other half of the subjects were primed for emotion-driven reactions with an ‘impression questionnaire’. 

Learning about identifiability reduced donations to identifiable victims, but didn’t increase generosity towards statistic victims. Reframing the intervention for the second study didn’t have a significant effect on donations. The implicit lesson still resulted in the identifiable victim receiving more than double the donation value as statistical victims, although the identifiable victim presented with additional statistical data didn’t fare as well. As predicted, this additional data dampened the affective system, making subjects less emotionally reactive. Priming analytical thought processes was successful in decreasing generosity towards identifiable victims - by almost 100% less compared to their emotion-primed counterparts. However, neither prime had any significant effect on donations to statistical victims.

• While this intervention is concerned with welfare, its hypotheses didn’t support increasing equity.
• It’s unclear whether the people included as examples of identifiable victims consented to being in the study. 
• Culture or background of the participant is not explored as a factor in attitudes towards statistical victims compared to identifiable victims.

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