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

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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.