Your Need Doesn't Appeal to Me: How Social Class Shapes Charitable Giving Across Causes

• Main Authors: Vieltes, Yan, Goldszmidt, Rafael, Andrade, Eduardo B
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Subjects: Consumer behavior; Donations; Philanthropy; Social classes
• ISSN: 0098-9258

Two recent tragedies received worldwide attention: the Cyclone Idai and the Notre-Dame Cathedral fire. While the former ranks as one of the deadliest tropical cyclones on record, the latter, though tragic for its cultural significance, did not affect people's access to pressing needs. Yet, members of the elite donated approximately ten times more to the rebuilding of the Notre-Dame Cathedral than to the victims of the cyclone (Martin 2019; Walsh 2019). Although celebrated by some, the enormous amounts donated to the Notre-Dame Cathedral have also triggered a massive public backlash (Sullivan 2019). At the center of the criticism was the question: which social causes are worthy of philanthropy for the rich? In this research, we shall demonstrate how a basic psychological process (i.e., sensitivity to need) may help explain this intriguing question. Individual experiences have been shown to largely shape donation preferences (Radley and Kennedy 1995). Small and Simonsohn (2008), for instance, showed that past experiences with a friend's misfortune increases sympathy towards other victims from the same plight. However, since social class often shapes personal experiences in a relatively homogeneous way (Kraus et al. 2012), it may well mold people's relative sensitivity to particular sets of misfortunes and thereby influence their prosocial choices. Given that lower-class individuals are embedded in contexts of generalized scarcity (Piff et al. 2012), we reasoned that they would present a greater sensitivity to the degree of need of social causes relative to their higher-class counterparts. Implicit in this reasoning is the idea that going from scarcity to abundance changes not only the amount of resources one has to give, but also the dimensions consumers are more sensitive to during the donation process. Among the poor, scarcity-based experiences should increase the donor's sensitivity to need. As a result, they should be more inclined to donate to more pressing causes (e.g., helping the homeless find shelter) than to relatively less pressing ones (e.g., promoting cultural activities). Among the wealthy, abundance-based experiences should reduce the donor's sensitivity to need and enhance the weight of other factors (e.g., social signaling; Sargeant and Woodliffe 2007). We test this possibility across 5 field studies with residents from extremely poor and wealthy areas of Brazil. In study 1, participants received five R$2.00 bills in return for their partici