How does social information affect charitable giving?: Empathic concern promotes support for underdog recipient
How does social information affect charitable giving?: Empathic concern promotes support for underdog recipient
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DOI：
10.1080/17470919.2019.1599421
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发表时间：
2019-03
影响因子：
2
通讯作者：
Yoshimatsu Saito;Atsushi Ueshima;Shigehito Tanida;T. Kameda
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Yoshimatsu Saito;Atsushi Ueshima;Shigehito Tanida;T. Kameda
摘要 慈善捐赠代表了人类独特的合作特征。在当今社交媒体盛行的环境中，我们的慈善决策似乎会受到项目受欢迎程度等社会信息的影响。在这里，我们报告了三项实验，研究了人们对慈善事业的社会信息的反应及其心理生理基础。首先，参与者被邀请为联合国儿童基金会的非洲或叙利亚项目捐款。然后，参与者有机会了解社会信息（即每个项目从以前的参与者那里筹集了多少资金），并根据需要改变他们的决定。与预期相反，当参与者得知自己的初始偏好与大多数之前参与者的选择一致时，他们在最终选择中表现出相当大的倾向，转向不太受欢迎的项目。这种反从众模式在三个实验中都很明显。眼球追踪数据（注视偏差和瞳孔扩张）表明，与在查看社交信息后保留最初偏好的“守护者”相比，这些“改变者”的生理唤起程度更高，并且在两个慈善项目之间形成了更多的差异性评价。这些结果表明，有关相对受欢迎程度的社会信息可能会引起对境况较差的目标的同情关注，这符合人类避免不平等分配的倾向。
ABSTRACT Charitable giving represents a unique cooperative characteristic of humans. In today’s environment with social media, our charitable decisions seem to be influenced by social information such as a project’s popularity. Here we report three experiments that examined people’s reactions to social information about a charitable endeavor and their psychophysiological underpinnings. Participants were first solicited to make donations to either the Africa or Syria project of UNICEF. Then participants were provided an opportunity to learn social information (i.e., how much each project had raised from previous participants) and change their decision if desired. Contrary to expectation, participants who learned that their initial preferences were consistent with the majority of previous participants’ choices exhibited a sizable tendency to switch to the less popular project in their final choices. This anti-conformity pattern was robust across the three experiments. Eye-tracking data (gaze bias and pupil dilation) indicated that these “Changers” were more physiologically aroused and formed more differential valuations between the two charity projects, compared to “Keepers” who retained their initial preferences after viewing the social information. These results suggest that social information about relative popularity may evoke empathic concern for the worse-off target, in line with the human tendency to avoid unequal distributions.