Revisiting positive and negative charity appeal effectiveness: moderation effect of color and victim-type

Abstract

The purpose of my dissertation is to understand prosocial (or helping) behavior when responding to a charitable appeal. I am interested in enhancing the persuasiveness of charity appeal by considering a moderating effect of an underexplored but critical variable: a valence of charity appeal (positive features vs. negative features) with other various effects or factors uncovered. This research, despite its significance, has been underexplored in marketing. Recent research shows that the physical warmth induced by contact with a warm object (e.g., holding a cup of hot coffee) evokes attitudes and behaviors linked to interpersonal warmth, including prosocial behavior. However, using grounded cognition literature, in the first essay, I reason that physically warm stimuli might not necessarily be required to induce perception of physical warmth, because non-haptic stimuli, such as certain colors and images of warm objects, might do the same. In five studies, I investigate the effects of various types of non-haptic stimuli on messages from charities seeking to promote prosocial behaviors. Findings of these studies indicate that non-haptic stimuli indeed can bolster the persuasiveness of charitable appeals with some contingencies. In the second essay, I investigate how singularity or identification effects are moderated by a charity appeal-type (positive vs. negative). While most previous studies found that a single victim is more persuasive than a group of victims (singularity effect) and that an identified victim is more appealing than a non-identified victim (identification effect), the dissertation examines how those effects are moderated by the type of charity appeal because people’s information processing depends on an appeal-type. I find that singularity or identification effects are line with the previous research for a negative appeal, in which empathy serves as a mediator. However, I find that the effects disappear, and even the results differ for a positive charity appeal, when positive emotions serve as a mediator.