Numeracy as a precursor to pro-social behavior: The impact of numeracy and presentation format on the cognitive mechanisms underlying donation decisions
Journal Title: Judgment and Decision Making - Year 2011, Vol 6, Issue 7
Abstract
Donation requests often convey numerical information about the people in need. In two studies we investigated the effects of numeracy and presentation format on the underlying affective and cognitive mechanisms of donation decisions. In Study 1, participants were presented with information about a victim in need, either in a frequency format or in a percentage format. In Study 2, we manipulated the identifiability and number of target victims. Our results demonstrate that donations of individuals lower in numeracy were more susceptible to changes in numeric presentation format than those higher in numeracy. Importantly, the underlying mechanisms for donations differed by numeracy. Whereas the mental image of the victim influenced donation decisions of less numerate people only, the estimated impact of a donation was positively correlated with donation amounts for both more and less numerate individuals.
Authors and Affiliations
Stephan Dickert, Janet Kleber, Ellen Peters, and Paul Slovic
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP677850
- DOI -
- Views 123
- Downloads 0
Randomization and serial dependence in professional tennis matches: Do strategic considerations, player rankings and match characteristics matter?
In many sports contests, the equilibrium requires players to randomize across repeated rounds, i.e., exhibit no temporal predictability. Such sports data present a window into the (in)efficiency of random sequence genera...
Towards an understanding of the relative strengths of positive and negative reciprocity
Scholars in economics and psychology have created a large literature studying reward, punishment and reciprocity. Labor markets constitute a popular application of this body of work, with particular emphasis on how recip...
Additivity dominance: Additivites are more potent and more often lexicalized across languages than are “subtractives”
Judgments of naturalness of foods tend to be more influenced by the process history of a food, rather than its actual constituents. Two types of processing of a “natural” food are to add something or to remove something....
Moral investing: Psychological motivations and implications
In four experiments we showed that investors are not only interested in maximizing returns but have non-financial goals, too. We considered what drives the decision to invest ethically and the impact this strategy has on...
Psychophysics and the judgment of price: Judging complex objects on a non-physical dimension elicits sequential effects like those in perceptual tasks
When participants in psychophysical experiments are asked to estimate or identify stimuli which differ on a single physical dimension, their judgments are influenced by the local experimental context — the item presented...