Engaging charitable giving: The motivational force of narrative versus philosophical argument

ABSTRACT

Are philosophical arguments as effective as narratives in influencing charitable giving and attitudes toward it? In four experiments, we exposed online research participants to either philosophical arguments in favor of charitable giving, a narrative about a child whose life was improved by charitable donations, both the narrative and the argument, or a control text (a passage from a middle school physics text or a description of charitable organizations). Participants then expressed their attitudes toward charitable giving and were either asked how much they would hypothetically donate if given $10 (Experiment 1) or told they had a 10% chance of winning $10 and given the opportunity to donate from their potential winnings (Experiments 2–4). Across the four experiments, participants in all of the narrative conditions and in some of the argument conditions tended to express more positive attitudes toward charitable giving and donated about $1 more on average than did participants in the control conditions. These effects appear to have been mediated by the “narrative transportation” scale, which suggests that appeals to donate can be effective if they engage participants’ emotions, imagery, and interest.

KEYWORDS:

• Charity
• empathy
• ethics
• moral psychology
• narrative

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data Availability Statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available at the Center for Open Science Foundation at https://osf.io/tm6e7.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/09515089.2022.2088340

Additional information

Funding

Supported by grants from The Life You Can Save and the University of California, Riverside Academic Senate. May’s work on this project was made possible through the support of a Dean's Humanities Grant at UAB and a grant from the John Templeton Foundation (Academic Cross-Training Fellowship 61581). The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the funding organizations. Ethics Approvals: University of California, Riverside: HS-17-002, HS 19-070; University of Alabama at Birmingham: 300003905, 300008454.

Notes on contributors

Eric Schwitzgebel

Eric Schwitzgebel is Professor of Philosophy at University of California, Riverside. He has published extensively in philosophy of mind, moral psychology, and epistemology. His most recent book is A Theory of Jerks and Other Philosophical Misadventures (MIT Press, 2019).

Christopher McVey

Christopher McVey received his PhD in philosophy from University of California, Riverside, in 2020, for a dissertation titled The Moral Importance of Narrative: A Philosophical Analysis of Narrative Transport. He is currently a software engineer at Rivian.

Joshua May

Joshua May is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He is the author of Regard for Reason in the Moral Mind (Oxford University Press, 2018) and co-editor of Agency in Mental Disorder (Oxford University Press, 2022).