Technology has made it easy for people to give donations
following natural disasters. When
reports of floods, typhoons, hurricanes, and earthquakes makes news, there are
websites available for people to give money.
People can even use their phones to donate money by text message.
What factors lead people to give money to a particular
disaster?
In the news reports following a disaster, there are usually
estimates of the number of people who were killed as well as the number of
individuals who were affected. The
affected individuals have often lost their homes and are in urgent need of
food, shelter, sanitation, and medical care.
Much of the money donated following a disaster goes to relief efforts to
help the survivors.
A paper by Ioannis Evangelidis and Bram Van den Bergh in the
November, 2013 issue of Psychological Science explored the influences on people’s
donations following disasters.
First, they analyzed the actual donations given following
natural disasters that occurred from 2000-2011 using publicly accessible
databases. They looked both at the
likelihood that money would be given following a particular disaster as well as
the amount of money given. They found
that the number of fatalities following the disaster was associated with a
higher likelihood that money would be given and that the amount of money given
increased with the number of fatalities.
The number of people affected was not a significant predictor of either
the likelihood that money would be given or the amount given. The researchers then obtained a similar
pattern in laboratory studies that described disasters using both the number of
fatalities and number of affected survivors.
The authors suggest that this pattern of giving is a
problem, because money is urgently needed to help survivors. An earthquake that kills only 100 people, but
leaves a million people homeless and without food and water leaves a lot of
people who need help, even though the earthquake did not kill many people. So, the researchers explored two ways to get
people to pay more attention to the number of survivors rather than to the
number of individuals killed in the disaster.
In one study, they asked half of the participants to compare
two disasters directly: one that killed 4,500 people and left 7,500 affected
survivors and a second that killed 7,500 and left 4,500 affected
survivors. They had to rank them
according to which should get more aid.
Afterward, they read about a single disaster and were asked how much
money they thought should be donated.
The number of individuals killed and the number of affected survivors
was manipulated so that different people saw different combinations of the
number killed and affected.
For those people in the control condition (who did not
compare the two disasters), their pattern of donations was similar to that in
previous studies. They suggested higher
donations for disasters with a large number of fatalities than for those with a
low number of fatalities. The number of
affected survivors did not influence their judgments.
Those who compared pairs of disasters first showed a
different pattern. They gave higher
donations to disasters with a large number of affected survivors, while the
number of fatalities did not influence suggested donations. That is, when people compared two disasters
first, it helped them to realize that the number of affected survivors is more
important than the number of fatalities when determining the amount of aid
needed.
A final study explored the possibility that people are unsure
what it means for a survivor to be “affected” by a disaster. This term is often used, because it covers
the many problems people may face after a disaster. So, some participants read about a disaster
in which the survivors were “affected” while others read about a disaster in
which the survivors were “homeless.”
Once again, the descriptions varied in the number of people who were
killed or affected/homeless.
In this study, when people were described as “affected” the
typical pattern emerged. The number of
fatalities predicted the amount of aid people wanted to see given to the
disaster. When people were described as
“homeless,” the number of fatalities had only a small influence on judgments,
and the number of survivors had a much larger impact, particularly for
disasters in which few people were killed.
Putting this all together, people’s judgments about
donations to disasters are often influenced by the number of people killed in
the disaster, even though the money is needed to help the survivors. If people can be induced to think about the
importance of the survivors and to recognize why they need aid, then that can
shift the pattern of donation. It will
be interesting to see whether aid organizations begin to use these data to
change the way they appeal to potential donors.
