Helping when the desire is low: Expectancy as a booster
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Helping when the desire is low: Expectancy as a booster Małgorzata Kossowska1 · Ewa Szumowska1 · Paulina Szwed1 · Aneta Czernatowicz‑Kukuczka2 · Arie W. Kruglanski3
© The Author(s) 2020
Abstract One might assume that the desire to help (here described as Want) is the essential driver of helping declarations and/or behaviors. However, even if desire to help (Want) is low, intention to help may still occur if the expectancy regarding the perceived effectiveness of helping is high. We tested these predictions in a set of three experimental studies. In all three, we measured the desire to help (Want) and the Expectancy that the aid would be impactful for the victim; in addition, we manipulated Expectancy in Study 3. In Studies 1 and 3, we measured the participants’ declaration to help while in Study 2, their helping behavior was examined. In all three studies, we used variations of the same story about a victim. The results supported our hypothesis. Thus, the studies help to tease apart the determinants of helping under conditions of lowered desire to do so, an issue of great importance in public policymaking. Keywords Intention to help · Helping behavior · Motivation to help · Social judgment · Social cognition
Introduction Vast research on helping focuses on the desire to help, i.e., the feeling of wanting to do something to help victims (for an overview see: Butts et al. 2019). However, eliciting a high desire to help is not always easy or even possible. This is usually the case in public policy decisions. Moreover, factors such as personal values, religion, personal experience (Charities Aid Foundation 2013), or demographic variables (Wunderink 2002) may lower people’s desire to help. Indeed, recent reports show that these factors systematically decrease the levels of charity in many countries (Charities Aid Foundation 2019; Roy Morgan’s Data 2019). Thus, the question arises as to how to foster helping in situations where the initial desire to do so is relatively weak. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-020-09853-3) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Małgorzata Kossowska [email protected] 1
Faculty of Philosophy, Institute of Psychology, Jagiellonian University, Ingardena 6, 30‑060 Kraków, Poland
2
Faculty of Philosophy, Institute of Religious Studies, Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland
3
Department of Psychology, Maryland University, College Park, USA
In this paper, we build on motivational readiness theory (Kruglanski et al. 2014) by examining the role of Expectancy in making decisions about charity donations. Expectancy in this case can be defined as the subjective assessment of the extent to which any aid will be impactful for the victim. One might assume that the desire to help (here described as Want) is the essential driver of helping declarations and/or behaviors. However, even if Want is low, declared or actual help may still occur if the Expec
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