Examining personal values and regulatory fit in poverty alleviation appeals: Impact on appeal evaluation, campaign interest, and donations

Woltin, Karl-Andrew;et.al.
(2024) 2024 Annual Meeting of the Belgian Association for Psychological Sciences — Location: Brussels (30.May.2024)

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Past work suggests that that matching messages‘ framing to people’s regulatory focus (i.e., regulatory fit) affects their persuasiveness and liking, with downstream consequences including charitable donations. At the same time, people‘s value priorities influence charity donation decisions. We examined joint effects by measuring participants’ (a) promotion focus on aspirations and gains versus prevention focus on obligations and losses and (b) their prioritization of the universalism-concern value. Participants (N=705) then read promotion- or prevention-framed appeals to act on poverty emphasizing universalism-concern by highlighting poverty-related inequality. They then evaluated the appeal, stated whether they wanted to receive materials on campaigns seeking to alleviate poverty, and could donate part of their remuneration to charities targeting poverty alleviation or other causes. Participants prioritizing universalism-concern evaluated the promotion-framed appeal more favorably the stronger their promotion focus was. A similar effect did not emerge for prevention-framed appeals, dovetailing past work on asymmetric regulatory fit in evaluative judgments. More importantly, only universalism-concern value prioritization predicted both interest in campaign materials and actual donations to poverty-focused charities (vs. to other charities or not donating at all). Furthermore, promotion-framed appeals predicted donations. Overall, employing promotion framed appeals when advocating for poverty alleviation thus seem advisable, but more important is an emphasis on content congruent with the universalism-concern value. These findings are consistent with work showing that the principle of „care“ (an individual trait) is consistently related to charitable giving, regardless of the framing of appeals, and indicate that in this context the importance of framing might have been overestimated.
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Woltin, K.-A., & et al. (2024). Examining personal values and regulatory fit in poverty alleviation appeals: Impact on appeal evaluation, campaign interest, and donations. 2024 Annual Meeting of the Belgian Association for Psychological Sciences, Brussels. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/217231