In the “I” of the storm: Shared initials increase disaster donations
Journal Title: Judgment and Decision Making - Year 2008, Vol 3, Issue 4
Abstract
People prefer their own initials to other letters, influencing preferences in many domains. The “name letter effect” (Nuttin, 1987) may not apply to negatively valenced targets if people are motivated to downplay or distance themselves from negative targets associated with the self, as previous research has shown (e.g., Finch & Cialdini, 1989). In the current research we examine the relationship between same initial preferences and negatively valenced stimuli. Specifically, we examined donations to disaster relief after seven major hurricanes to test the influence of the name letter effect with negatively valenced targets. Individuals who shared an initial with the hurricane name were overrepresented among hurricane relief donors relative to the baseline distribution of initials in the donor population. This finding suggests that people may seek to ameliorate the negative effects of a disaster when there are shared characteristics between the disaster and the self.
Authors and Affiliations
Jesse Chandler, Tiffany M. Griffin, and Nicholas Sorensen
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP677640
- DOI -
- Views 146
- Downloads 0
Partner selection supported by opaque reputation promotes cooperative behavior
Reputation plays a major role in human societies, and it has been proposed as an explanation for the evolution of cooperation. While the majority of previous studies equates reputation with a transparent and complete his...
Overlap of accessible information undermines the anchoring effect
According to the Selective Accessibility Model of anchoring, the comparison question in the standard anchoring paradigm activates information that is congruent with an anchor. As a consequence, this information will be m...
Measuring the relative contributions of rule-based and exemplar-based processes in judgment: Validation of a simple model
Judgments and decisions can rely on rules to integrate cue information or on the retrieval of similar exemplars from memory. Research on exemplar-based processes in judgment has discovered several task variables influenc...
Response dynamics: A new window on the decision process
The history of judgment and decision making is defined by a trend toward increasingly nuanced explanations of the decision making process. Recently, process models have become incredibly sophisticated, yet the tools avai...
Biases in casino betting: The hot hand and the gambler’s fallacy
We examine two departures of individual perceptions of randomness from probability theory: the hot hand and the gambler’s fallacy, and their respective opposites. This paper’s first contribution is to use data from the...