| 1. |
- Erlandsson, Arvid, 1982-, et al.
(författare)
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Attitudes and donation behavior when reading positive and negative charity appeals
- 2018
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Ingår i: Journal of Nonprofit & Public Sector Marketing. - : Routledge. - 1049-5142 .- 1540-6997. ; 30:4, s. 444-474
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article tries to clarify whether negative charity appeals (i.e., advertisements emphasizing the bad consequences of not helping) or positive charity appeals (i.e., advertisements emphasizing the good consequences of helping) are more effective. Previous literature does not provide a single answer to this question and we suggest that one contributing reason for this is that different studies have operationalized appeal effectiveness in different ways (e.g., actual behavior, self-rated helping intentions, or expressed attitudes about the ad or the organization). Results from four separate studies suggest that positive appeals are more effective in inducing favorable attitudes toward the ad and toward the organization but that negative appeals are more effective (in studies 1A and 1B) or at least equally effective (in studies 1C and 1D) in eliciting actual donations. Also, although people’s attitude toward the appeal (i.e., liking) was a good predictor for the expected effectiveness in increasing donation behavior (in Study 2), it was a poor predictor of actual donation behavior in all four main studies. These results cast doubt on marketing theories suggesting that attitudes toward an advertisement and toward the brand always lead to higher purchase behavior.
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| 2. |
- Moche, Hajdi, 1991-
(författare)
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Unequal Valuations of Lives and What to Do About It : The Role of Identifiability, Numbers, and Age in Charitable Giving
- 2022
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Many people choose to donate money to help victims of humanitarian crises. However, people’s donation decisions often fail to reflect that all victims are equally valuable to help. Instead, some victims seem to be favored. This thesis aims to better understand valuations of lives by looking at how people respond to charity appeals that differ on three factors: level of identifiability (if there is an identified victim or not), numbers in need (if there is one, few, or many victims in need), and age (if the victim is a child or an adult). This thesis also tests two kinds of interventions in charitable giving aimed to make people value lives more equally regarding numbers in need and the identifiability of victims. Paper I investigated how the identifiable victim effect (i.e., more willingness to help an identified victim than unidentified victims) influences people’s donation decisions if they are reminded of alternative uses of money (i.e., opportunity cost). In two studies, participants (N = 2397) saw a charity appeal that either included an identified victim or not, while either receiving an opportunity cost reminder or not. The results showed that for a one-time donation decision, people became less willing to donate when reminded of opportunity cost, but mainly for non-identified charity appeals. Paper II investigated how the victim’s age relates to the identifiable victim effect. In three studies, participants (N = 1508) saw a charity appeal that either helped children or adults, and either included an identified victim or not. The results showed that people did not donate more if the charity appeal included an identified victim, regardless of whether the victim was a child or an adult, but that people were more motivated to help or more willing to donate to children than adults. Paper III investigated two types of deliberation interventions for the singularity effect (i.e., increased willingness to help a single identified victim over a group of identified victims). In two studies, participants (N = 900) saw a charity appeal that either depicted one or eight identified children in need, and either got an intervention prompting them to rely on deliberate thinking, an intervention asking them to rate the importance of four decision-relevant attributes, or no intervention at all. The singularity effect was found in control conditions, but not in either of the intervention conditions. However, this was at the expense of decreasing the help to the single victim, without increasing help to the group of victims. Paper IV investigated the unit asking intervention in relation to victim identifiability and the number of victims in need. In three studies, participants (N = 4206) either underwent the unit asking intervention, in which they indicated a hypothetical amount to one victim before answering how much to donate to a group of victims, or no intervention. In the first two studies, participants also saw a charity appeal that either included an identified victim – with varying levels of identifiability – or not. In the third study, participants saw an appeal that either included the picture of one or five children, and involved providing help to either 20 or 200 children. People in control conditions were unaffected by whether the charity appeal included an identified victim or not, and they did not donate more when more victims were in need. However, participants in the unit asking conditions donated more when more victims were in need and donated more regardless of the level of identifiability. In conclusion, this thesis shows that people’s donation decisions are affected to different extents by the information in the charity appeal related to identifiability, numbers in need, and age – which can result in unequal valuations of lives. This thesis also shows that interventions, especially the unit asking method, can make valuations of lives more equal. Taken together, this thesis contributes to a broader understanding of how people make decisions regarding charity and how interventions can impact such decision-making processes.
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| 3. |
- Andersson, Per A, 1986-
(författare)
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Norms in Prosocial Decisions : The Role of Observability, Avoidance, and Conditionality
- 2022
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Prosocial behaviors benefit other people and range from donations to charity to behavior limiting the spread of disease, such as masking and vaccination. The overarching purpose of this thesis was to contribute to our understanding of how social norms and conformity affect prosocial behavior. Here, three norm-related factors that affect such prosocial behavior were investigated: observability, avoidance and conditionality. Observability concerns whether a person is being observed during prosocial decisions, which can typically increase conformity to norms. Avoidance concerns whether a person avoids or seeks out knowledge about prosocial norms. Conditionality concerns the conditional nature of when behavior shifts occur in relation to others behavior. For instance, a person may want to follow a prosocial norm only if a very large majority adheres to it, or only if the goal of the norm is realistic to attain. Paper I focused on observability of prosocial decisions. Making decisions while knowing they would be shown to others increased prosocial behavior in the form of cooperation in a Public Goods Game, and preferences for deontological choices in moral dilemmas, but not donations given to charity. Paper II examined the existence of avoidance behavior regarding social norm about donations. Such norm avoiders appeared to be comprised of both prosocial and less prosocial individuals. Paper III investigated the interplay between descriptive (what people do) and injunctive (what one should do) norms in regards to masking during COVID-19. Paper IV then explored how varying the goal set for a prosocial norm affects willingness to try to achieve the goal, in the context of thresholds for herd immunity and vaccines for COVID-19. Some individuals were demotivated by seeing a higher goal as harder to achieve and others were motivated by believing a higher goal to lead to more people getting vaccinated. Taken together, these papers point to the inherent complexity of how norms relate to prosocial behavior, and suggest relevant aspects to consider when wanting to promote prosocial behavior.
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| 4. |
- Andersson, Per A, 1986-, et al.
(författare)
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Prosocial and moral behavior under decision reveal in a public environment
- 2020
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Ingår i: Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics. - : Elsevier. - 2214-8043 .- 2214-8051. ; 87
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- People may act differently in public environments due to actual reputation concerns, or due to the mere presence of others. Unlike previous studies on the influence of observability on prosocial behavior we control for the latter while manipulating the former, i.e. we control for implicit reputation concerns while manipulating explicit. We show that revealing decisions in public did not affect altruistic behavior, while it increased cooperation and made subjects less likely to make utilitarian judgments in sacrificial dilemmas (i.e., harming one to save many). Our findings are in line with theoretical models suggesting that people, at large, are averse to standing out in both positive and negative ways when it comes to altruistic giving. This "wallflower effect" does however not seem to extend to decisions on cooperation and moral judgments made in public.
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| 5. |
- Aspernäs, Julia, et al.
(författare)
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Motivated formal reasoning : Ideological belief bias in syllogistic reasoning across diverse political issues
- 2023
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Ingår i: Thinking and Reasoning. - : Routledge; Taylor & Francis. - 1354-6783 .- 1464-0708. ; 29:1, s. 43-69
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This study investigated ideological belief bias, and whether this effect is moderated by analytical thinking. A Swedish nationally representative sample (N = 1005) evaluated non-political and political syllogisms and were asked whether the conclusions followed logically from the premises. The correct response in the political syllogisms was aligned with either leftist or rightist political ideology. Political orientation predicted response accuracy for political but not non-political syllogisms. Overall, the participants correctly evaluated more syllogisms when the correct response was congruent with their ideology, particularly on hot-button issues (asylum to refugees, climate change, gender-neutral education, and school marketization). Analytical thinking predicted higher accuracy for syllogisms of any kind among leftists, but it predicted accuracy only for leftist and non-political syllogisms among rightists. This research contributes by refining a promising paradigm for studying politically motivated reasoning, demonstrating ideological belief bias outside of the United States across diverse political issues, and providing the first evidence that analytical thinking may reduce such bias.
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| 6. |
- Erlandsson, Arvid, 1982-, et al.
(författare)
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Bullshit-sensitivity predicts prosocial behavior
- 2018
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Ingår i: PLOS ONE. - San Francisco, United States : Public Library of Science. - 1932-6203. ; 13:7
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Bullshit-sensitivity is the ability to distinguish pseudo-profound bullshit sentences (e.g. “Your movement transforms universal observations”) from genuinely profound sentences (e.g. “The person who never made a mistake never tried something new”). Although bullshit-sensitivity has been linked to other individual difference measures, it has not yet been shown to predict any actual behavior. We therefore conducted a survey study with over a thousand participants from a general sample of the Swedish population and assessed participants’ bullshit-receptivity (i.e. their perceived meaningfulness of seven bullshit sentences) and profoundness-receptivity (i.e. their perceived meaningfulness of seven genuinely profound sentences), and used these variables to predict two types of prosocial behavior (self-reported donations and a decision to volunteer for charity). Despite bullshit-receptivity and profoundness-receptivity being positively correlated with each other, logistic regression analyses showed that profoundness-receptivity had a positive association whereas bullshit-receptivity had a negative association with both types of prosocial behavior. These relations held up for the most part when controlling for potentially intermediating factors such as cognitive ability, time spent completing the survey, sex, age, level of education, and religiosity. The results suggest that people who are better at distinguishing the pseudo-profound from the actually profound are more prosocial.
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| 7. |
- Erlandsson, Arvid, 1982-
(författare)
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Hjälpdilemman : Beslutsfattande när man inte kan hjälpa alla i nöd
- 2020
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Ingår i: Statsvetenskaplig Tidskrift. - Lund, Sweden : Fahlbeckska Stiftelsen. - 0039-0747. ; 122:4, s. 601-624
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Tidskriftsartikel (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Helping dilemmas occur when it is impossible to help everyone in need, and when one must decide how to allocate resources across multiple beneficiaries. Deciding which patient that should be connected to the only available respirator, or deciding which charitable organization to donate to, are both examples of real-life helping dilemmas. This paper examines the meaning of moral dilemmas and especially helping dilemmas, discusses different normative perspectives of helping dilemmas as well as the influential effective altruism movement, and summarizes findings from my own and other’s empirical research related to how people behave when faced with helping dilemmas.
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| 8. |
- Erlandsson, Arvid, 1982-
(författare)
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Smittminskningsprosocialitet : Hjälpandets psykologi i en pandemi
- 2021
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Ingår i: Statsvetenskaplig Tidskrift. - Lund, Sweden : Fahlbeckska Stiftelsen. - 0039-0747. ; 123:5, s. 189-210
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Tidskriftsartikel (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Washing one’s hands, maintaining physical distance, not meeting elderly, or avoid-ing eating out, were up until recently not perceived to be characteristically moral behaviors. For known reasons, this changed in early 2020, and these behaviors are now perceived as good examples of human prosociality because they reduce the risk of spreading the Coronavirus. This chapter zooms in on how the Covid-19 pan-demic changed human prosociality. I begin by defining and operationalizing the term “infection-reducing prosociality” and compare this novel type of prosocial-ity against traditional prosociality (donating money and volunteering) and against another modern type of prosociality (climate-friendly behavior). I then review recent Covid-related research that have investigated: (A) which individual-level and cultural-level factors that predict infection-reducing prosociality, or (B) how social norms and different types of persuasion messages influence infection-reducing prosociality. In the final part, I discuss some of the many heuristics and biases that can influence human judgment and decision making when communicating risk, and conclude that disagreements about national policies occur not only because of uncertainty regarding consequences, but also because different people value dif-ferent things in life.
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| 9. |
- Erlandsson, Arvid, 1982-, et al.
(författare)
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Spontaneous charitable donations in Sweden before and after COVID : A natural experiment
- 2022
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Ingår i: Journal of Philanthropy and Marketing. - : John Wiley & Sons Ltd. - 2691-1361. ; 27:3
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Did the outbreak of COVID-19 influence spontaneous donation behavior? To investigate this, we conducted a natural experiment on real donation data. We analyzed the absolute amount, and the proportion of total payments, donated by individuals to charitable organizations via Swish-a widely used mobile online payment application through which most Swedes prefer to make their donations to charity-each day of 2019 and 2020. Spontaneous charitable donations were operationalized as Swish-payments to numbers starting with 90, as this number is a nationally acknowledged quality control label that is provided to all fundraising operations that are monitored by the Swedish Fundraising Control. The results show that the Swish-donations fluctuated substantially depending on season (less donations in January-February and during the summer months, and more donations in April-May and during the last months of the year) and specific events (peaks in Swish-donations often coincided with televised charity fundraising galas). Interrupted time-series analyses revealed that spontaneous donations were overall unaffected by the pandemic outbreak.
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| 10. |
- Erlandsson, Arvid, 1982-, et al.
(författare)
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Type and amount of help as predictors for impression of helpers
- 2020
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Ingår i: PLOS ONE. - San Francisco, CA, United States : Public Library of Science. - 1932-6203. ; 15:12
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Impression of helpers can vary as a function of the magnitude of helping (amount of help) and of situational and motivational aspects (type of help). Over three studies conducted in Sweden and the US, we manipulated both the amount and the type of help in ten diverse vignettes and measured participants’ impressions of the described helpers. Impressions were almost unaffected when increasing the amount of help by 500%, but clearly affected by several type of help-manipulations. Particularly, helpers were less positively evaluated if they had mixed motives for helping, did not experience intense emotions or empathy, or if helping involved no personal sacrifice. In line with the person-centered theory of moral judgment, people seem to form impressions of helpers primarily based on the presumed underlying processes and motives of prosociality rather than its consequences.
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