Effects of negative social information on the willingness to support charities: the moderating role of regulatory focus
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Effects of negative social information on the willingness to support charities: the moderating role of regulatory focus Nhat Quang Le 1
& Magne
Supphellen 2 & Richard P. Bagozzi 3
# The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Donation campaigns that have an unsuccessful start often trigger negative social information in the social and mass media (e.g., “few others have donated so far”). Little research exists to shed light on the effects of such information in the context of donations. Across three studies involving different causes and different channels of communication, we find harmful effects of negative social information on the willingness to donate among prevention-focused consumers but tendencies of positive effects for consumers with a promotion focus. We identify response efficacy as a mediator of the harmful effect for prevention-focused consumers. This finding suggests that social proof theory is not sufficient to explain the harmful effect of negative social information. Alternative mediators are tested and rejected. The findings imply that an effective strategy to avoid harmful effects of negative social information is to trigger a promotion focus in target group members and communicate facts about charity effectiveness. Keywords Willingness to donate . Donation behaviors . Social information . Response
efficacy . Charities
1 Introduction The competition for private donations is fierce, and the efforts of charities to mobilize stakeholders often fail (e.g., Bielefeld 2014). Social and mass media reports on such Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s11002-02009540-w) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
* Nhat Quang Le [email protected] Magne Supphellen [email protected] Richard P. Bagozzi [email protected] Extended author information available on the last page of the article
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failures typically contain negative social information, such as “few have donated so far” or “the response has been slow.” For instance, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) reported in 2014 that “donations were slow” for the annual Moncton Christmas holiday charity campaigns (CBC News 2014). The Intelligencer reported in October 2018: “The local United Way campaign is only a month old, but already it’s lagging behind that of last year, when the charity failed to meet its fundraising goal for the second consecutive year” (Hendry 2018). Both reports reveal negative information about the behavior of other people: few others have donated. The question is how such information may influence the willingness to donate. A large number of studies show that positive social information (that many have donated) may increase the willingness to support good causes (e.g., Croson et al. 2009; ElgaaiedGambier et al. 2018), but we know less about the effects of negative social information. There is certainly a risk that such information may keep donations low and prevent slow-starting campaigns from gaining momentum. However, we sugges
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