Doctoral Dissertation Research in DRMS: Donation appeals for conservation - the influence of moral worldviews and moral foundations

过去的研究表明，与人们的道德价值观和信仰相匹配的外联信息可以非常有效地产生理想的亲社会或亲环境行为，包括慈善捐赠。这个项目通过调查两种特定类型的道德信息的有效性，为现有的研究做出了贡献。这项研究产生了关于有效信息传递的新知识，直接关系到非政府保护组织的筹资努力。本研究的主要目的是了解“道德基础”和“道德世界观”这两个道德变量对捐赠行为的影响及其相互作用。道德基础描述了个人认为是道德的问题和基本价值观的类型（即道德关注的“什么”），而道德世界观描述了个人认为是道德关注的哪些实体（即道德关注的“谁”）。研究小组在一个三乘二的因子研究设计中，在六个处理传单上实验地操纵这两个变量。在六份传单中，有两份的宣传信息引用了三种不同的道德世界观：人类中心主义（只关心人类）、非人类中心主义（关心人类和非人类）和虚假非人类中心主义（只关心非人类）。在六份传单中，有三份的特色信息援引了两种不同的道德基础：约束，强调权威、忠诚和纯洁；个性化，强调伤害和公平的问题。该实验嵌入在一项针对美国公众的在线调查中，以实际捐赠行为作为关键响应变量进行衡量。该项目结合了环境伦理学和道德与社会心理学的理论框架，代表了社会科学和人文科学多个分支的跨学科研究和奖学金的整合。这项工作不仅加强了我们对慈善捐赠的理解，而且还有助于建立和发展道德基础理论的研究体系，特别是在说服性信息的背景下。

Past research has shown that outreach messages matching people's moral values and beliefs can be highly effective in producing desirable pro-social or pro-environmental behaviors, including charitable donations. This project contributes to extant research by investigating the effectiveness of two specific types of moral messages. The research is directly relevant to the fund-raising efforts of conservation non-governmental organizations by producing new knowledge about effective messaging. The primary objective of this research is to understand the effects of and interactions between two morality variables, "moral foundation" and "moral worldview," as they pertain to donation behavior. Moral foundation describes the types of issues and basic values an individual perceives to be moral (i.e., the "what" of moral concern), while moral worldview describes which sorts of entities an individual perceives to be of moral concern (i.e., the "who" of moral concern). The research teams manipulates these two variables experimentally across six treatment flyers in a three-by-two factorial research design. Two of the six flyers feature outreach messages invoking each of three different moral worldviews: anthropocentric (expressing concern only for humans), non-anthropocentric (expressing concern for humans and nonhumans), and false non-anthropocentric (expressing concern only for non-humans). Three of the six flyers feature messages invoking each of two different moral foundations: binding, emphasizing issues of authority, loyalty, and purity; and individualizing, emphasizing issues of harm and fairness. The experiment is embedded in an online survey of the American public, with actual donation behavior measured as the key response variable. Combining theoretical frameworks from environmental ethics and moral and social psychology, this project represents an interdisciplinary integration of research and scholarship from multiple branches of the social sciences and the humanities. This work not only stands to enhance our understanding of charitable giving, but it also contributes to an established and growing body of research on moral foundations theory, particularly in the context of persuasive messaging.