The Compassion Fade Framework in the Social Media Context: Applying Place Attachment to Advertising Strategies for Monetary Donations

Abstract

This study applies the compassion fade framework to the social media context by considering the moderating role of place attachment. By integrating the compassion fade framework with place attachment theory, this study conducted an online experiment with four conditions and recruited participants in the United States from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. The empirical findings revealed that given the place attachment condition, social media users’ monetary donation intention was significantly influenced by empathetic concern and anticipated affect, and social media users’ monetary donation intention was significantly affected only by empathetic concern under the general place condition. The path from anticipated affect to monetary donation intention was statistically different between the general place condition and the place attachment condition. Based on these empirical findings, this study makes several meaningful contributions to the extant literature on donation advertisement and their implications for social media advertising strategies.