Abstract
The present study aimed to explore the influence of donation amounts on donation decisions in different donation contexts and to reveal the psychological mechanisms. Furthermore, we focused on how to enhance individuals’ intention to donate voluntarily. We designed an experiment on donation decisions, employing event-related potentials (ERPs) to probe the effect of psychological mechanisms on donation decisions by detecting the neural basis of donation decision-making. Based on S-O-R (stimulus-organism-response) theory, we used donation contexts and donation amounts (stimuli) to induce psychological activity in the participants (organism) and then influence individual donation decision behaviors (response). Moreover, we applied psychological reactance (PR) theory to discuss the effect of donation context on decisions and the corresponding psychological process. The behavioral results showed that donation contexts (mandatory vs. voluntary) were significantly related to the donation amounts (i.e., less vs. more money that the charity received than money that the participants donated). At the ERP level, compared with mandatory donation, voluntary donation evoked a larger P2 amplitude when the charity received less money. In addition, a larger mean amplitude of LPP was elicited by voluntary donation compared to mandatory donation. This study provides practical implications for charity organizers to guide people to donate voluntarily.
Highlights
Charitable donation is an important part of modern civil society and is a necessary supplement to the government in the public sector (Strang and Park, 2016)
Participants were told that the donation would happen whether they chose the “acknowledge” or “invalid” button for the mandatory condition; analyzing mandatory donation decisions was unnecessary
The pairwise t-test was performed for donation intention between comparison of amount that the charity received under the voluntary condition, and the results showed a significant effect [t(1, 26) = –12.947, p < 0.001]
Summary
Charitable donation is an important part of modern civil society and is a necessary supplement to the government in the public sector (Strang and Park, 2016). Voluntary contributions are vital for some programs (such as art, health care, social welfare, and higher education) in modern society (Mayr et al, 2009). People’s intention to donate to charity is not high in most countries. Voluntary donation accounted for only 0.14% of the GDP in China in 2019 (Charity alliance, 2019). It is critical to explore how to increase people’s willingness to donate voluntarily. To solve this problem, it is necessary to investigate individuals’ motivation to make voluntary donations
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