Examining personal values and regulatory fit in poverty alleviation appeals: Impact on appeal evaluation, campaign interest, and donations
(2024) CIPS2024 Congrès International de Psychologie Sociale — Location: Brussels, Belgium (11.July.2024)
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- Abstract
- Past work suggests that that matching message framing to people’s regulatory focus (i.e., regulatory fit) affects the persuasiveness and liking of messages, with downstream consequences including the willingness to help. At the same time, people‘s value priorities are known to 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 refined universalism-concern value (i.e., commitment to equality, justice, and protection of all people). Participants (N = 705) read promotion- or prevention-framed appeals to act on poverty, with the appeal of interest emphasizing universalism-concern by highlighting poverty related inequality. To conceal our research question, the respective promotion- or prevention-framed appeal of interest was randomly presented among three further promotion- or prevention-framed appeals expressing other refined values. Participants 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, which dovetails 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 made to poverty-focused charities (vs. to other charities or not donating at all). Based on our findings, employing promotion framed messages when advocating for poverty alleviation seem advisable, but more important is an emphasis on content congruent with universalism-concern value concerns. They are consistent with recent 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. CIPS2024 Congrès International de Psychologie Sociale, Brussels, Belgium. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/217229