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THE INFLUENCE OF ENTITATIVITY ON CHARITABLE GIVING

All for One: The Influence of Entitativity on Charitable Giving

Katherine A. Burson and Robert W. Smith

Ross School of Business, University of Michigan

David Faro

London Business School

Author Note

Katherine A. Burson, Ross School of Business, University of Michigan; Robert

W. Smith, Ross School of Business, University of Michigan; David Faro, London

Business School.

The authors would like to thank Dan Bartels, Jesse Chandler, Aradhna Krishna,

Richard Larrick, Raj Raghunathan, Scott Rick, Norbert Schwarz, Deborah Small, S.

Sriram, and David Wooten for helpful suggestions and comments, and David Schkade for

posing the question that lead to this project.

Correspondence regarding this article may be addressed to Katherine A. Burson,

Ross School of Business, University of Michigan, 701 Tappan St., R5484, Ann Arbor,

MI 48109, ([email protected]).

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mailto:[email protected]


Abstract

People often react strongly and donate generously to an individual victim. However,

emotional reactions and donations to a large number of victims are typically more muted.

Our experiments show that people donate more to large numbers of victims if these are

perceived as entitative—belonging to a single, coherent unit. For example, donations to

help a large number of animals are higher when these belong to a herd. Priming tasks that

make participants more likely to perceive victims as entitative have a similar effect. We

suggest entitativity increases the strength and coherence of victims’ defining traits. Thus,

victims with positive traits are viewed more positively when entitative, increasing

concern and donations. However, increasing the entitativity of victims that share negative

traits has the opposite effect, reducing concern and donations.

Keywords: charitable giving, entitativity, scope insensitivity

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All for One: The Influence of Entitativity on Charitable Giving

People react strongly to images, names, and personal stories of individual victims.

In the 1980s, a photograph of an Afghan orphan girl on the cover of National Geographic

captured public imagination and became a symbol both of the Soviet-Afghan conflict and

of the refugee situation worldwide. A foundation in her honor was established, leveraging

the public interest in her story to help the hundreds of thousands of other children

victimized by the war. However, when it comes to helping large numbers of victims,

charitable reactions are typically more muted (see Slovic, 2007, for a review). People

tend to donate less to a large number of statistical victims than to a single identified

victim (Small, Loewenstein, & Slovic, 2007).

The apathy for large numbers of victims relative to the generousness to single

identified victims has been decried as virtually impossible to overcome (Slovic, 2007). It

is seen as tragic and an inefficient use of public resources, and blamed as one reason for

the weak response to several large-scale genocides throughout history (Slovic, 2007). A

prominent explanation for this phenomenon is that identifying victims with details such

as names and pictures triggers emotion and increases donations (Kogut & Ritov, 2005b;

see also Small et al., 2007). We propose another reason: Large groups lack the

psychological coherence and unity that single victims possess. Indeed, we demonstrate

that people can show strong emotional reaction and donate generously to large numbers

of victims when they form a single entity.

To motivate our hypothesis, consider two recent findings in this literature that

initially appear discrepant. Small and Loewenstein (2003) showed that the effect of

victim-identifying information on donations can extend to groups: People donated more

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to help an identified group of victims than an unidentified group. On the other hand,

Kogut and Ritov observed no effect of victim-identification when a donation appeal

concerned multiple victims (Kogut & Ritov, 2005a; 2005b). One potentially important

feature of Small and Loewenstein’s study is that the victims in the charitable appeal

belonged to the same family. In contrast, the victims in Kogut and Ritov’s studies were

not connected in any meaningful way.

The fact that identifying information influenced donations for a family but not for

a group of unrelated victims implies that the degree to which a collection of victims

forms a meaningful entity can, as we suggested, play a role in concern and donations.

Theoretically, we draw primarily on the concept of entitativity—the extent to which a

social aggregate is perceived as a coherent unit or real entity (Campbell, 1958).

Entitativity is an important factor in explaining why people form different

impressions of groups than individuals (Hamilton & Sherman, 1996). When people form

impressions of an individual, they tend to see him or her as a psychologically coherent

unit and expect consistency of traits or behaviors. A group of individuals, on the other

hand, tends to be less entitative than a single individual (McConnell, Sherman, &

Hamilton, 1997): People expect and perceive less consistency and coherence in groups

(Hamilton & Sherman, 1996). Critically, perceived entitativity results in stronger

perceptual and emotional reactions for an individual than a group (Hamilton & Sherman,

1996).

Notably, however, some groups produce judgments similar to those produced by

individuals. Examples are intimacy groups—groups that are important to their members

and impermeable, such as families, friends, and street-gangs (Brewer, Hong, & Li, 2004;

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Hamilton, Sherman, & Rodgers, 2004; Lickel et al., 2000). Emphasizing common values,

purpose, and fate can therefore increase perceived entitativity (Abelson, Dasgupta, Park,

& Banaji, 1998). Entitativity can also be increased through perceptual, Gestalt features

such as proximity, symmetry, similarity, or collective movement (Bartels & Burnett,

2010; McConnell et al., 1997; Yzerbyt, Rogier, & Fiske, 1998).

When assessing highly entitative groups, people attempt to extract their

underlying essence, just as they do for individuals (Yzerbyt, Rocher, & Schadron, 1997).

Consequently, entitative groups elicit stronger judgments than non-entitative groups, with

attributions, emotional reactions, and behavior all magnified (Abelson et al., 1998;

Brewer et al., 2004; Dasgupta, Banaji, & Abelson, 1999; Spencer-Rodgers, Hamilton, &

Sherman, 2007; Thakkar, 2006). It has also been suggested that the magnification of

responses for entitative groups can result in more extreme impressions of a group’s traits

(see Thakkar, 2006, for a discussion).

Drawing on these ideas we suggest that, for victims with positive traits, increased

entitativity should elicit greater emotional concern and higher donations. This is what we

find in our first two experiments. However, for victims with negative traits, entitativity

may decrease emotional concern and donations. We show this in our final experiment.

Though entitativity has recently emerged as a possible explanation for greater

sympathy and charitable response towards single identified victims, it has not been

systematically manipulated (Dickert, 2008; Kogut & Ritov, 2005a; 2005b; Slovic, 2007).

In particular, there have been no tests of the role of entitativity in charitable response that

hold number of victims and other factors such as identifying information constant.

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Similarly, measures of perceived entitativity have provided mixed results (Dickert, 2008;

Thakkar, 2006).

In the experiments that follow, we employ a variety of settings involving human

and animal victims, vary number of victims, elicit hypothetical and real donations, and

manipulate entitativity in two ways—conceptually and perceptually. First, we contrast

donations to large numbers of victims that belong to the same intimacy group with

donations to the same number of victims not connected in any way. We also employ a

perceptual manipulation of the construct by priming Gestalt versus piecemeal processing

in a preceding task.

Study 1a: Increasing Donations through Conceptual Entitativity

In this experiment, we manipulated perceived entitativity by presenting the

victims as belonging to the same intimacy group or not. We then measured participants’

concern for the victims and their charitable donations.

Method

One hundred and twenty six students from a large Midwestern-USA university

were paid $10 each in exchange for participating in a series of unrelated studies.

Participants were presented with a hypothetical scenario in which gazelle on a preserve

were being killed by hyenas and were asked to indicate how much they would donate to

help build an $8,000 protective fence. The presentation of the number of gazelle at risk

was manipulated between participants: A single gazelle, 200 gazelle, or a herd of 200

gazelle. Note that while there are two entitative-victim conditions—the single gazelle and

the herd of 200 gazelle—we are primarily interested in the contrast between the entitative

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200 and unrelated 200 gazelle. Participants indicated their donation intention on a scale

from $0 to $50 in $5 increments (a fill-in-the-blank other option was never selected).

To test whether the manipulation of entitativity changed participants’ emotional

concern for the victims, we also asked how touched, upset, morally responsible, and

sympathetic participants felt towards the gazelle on 1 (not at all) to 7 (extremely) scales

(adapted from Small et al., 2007). We combined these measures into a single measure of

concern (α = .89).

Results and Discussion

We predicted that increasing the entitativity of victims with favorable traits would

increase the emotional and charitable response to them. A pre-test examining how

beautiful, pleasant, and good participants imagined the gazelle (α > .88) confirmed that

gazelle were viewed positively, M = 1.68, SD = 1.45, t(80) = 10.46, p < .001, d = 1.16,

significantly higher than the neutral midpoint of zero on the 11-point scale. An ANOVA

revealed an effect of victim presentation on donation amount in the main study, F(2, 123)

= 3.26, p = .042, ηp2 = .05. Figure 1 shows that donations to a single gazelle were not

different from donations to 200 gazelle, F(1, 123) = 2.15, p = .146, d = .38. This result

replicates the finding of similar donations to single and multiple victims who are not

identified (Kogut & Ritov, 2005a; 2005b). However, as we predicted, donations were

higher for a herd of 200 gazelle than for 200 unrelated gazelle, F(1, 123) = 6.46, p = .012,

d = .55. Similar results were found for the medians.

The two entitative conditions (single and herd) were treated similarly in

donations, F(1, 123) = 1.16, p = .283, and concern, F(1, 123) = .90, p = .854. We

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combined them and, as predicted, rating of concern fully mediated the effect of

entitativity on donations, Sobel Z = 2.18, p = .029.

The results of Study 1a show that entitativity leads to higher donations and that

this effect is mediated by participants’ concern for the victim(s). Participants donated

more to save a herd of 200 gazelle than 200 unrelated gazelle. This suggests that people

are more likely to help tight social groups than loose ones, a possibility that is somewhat

surprising given that the gazelle in a herd at least have each other as support. These

results are consistent with our theory that entitativity affects people’s perceptions of

victims and emotional reactions. One alternative interpretation is that these results may

also be driven by inferences participants might make regarding the efficacy and impact of

their donations. People tend to donate more generously as the reference group to which

the victims belong grows smaller and the proportion helped thus increases (Slovic,

Fischhoff, & Lichtenstein, 1980). For instance, a disease that kills 100 people out of a

group of 100 seems more severe and worthy of response than a disease that kills 100

across a country (Small & Loewenstein, 2003). It is possible that the herd may act as its

own reference group and donations to help it seem more impactful, but that the unrelated

gazelle do not and donations to them are perceived as mere drops-in-the-bucket (Bartels

and Burnett 2010; Singer 1972). The mediating role of emotions in the previous study

provides some evidence against this account. The next study addresses it more directly by

employing a perceptual manipulation of entitativity.

Study 1b: Increasing Donations through Perceptual Entitativity

Research shows that looking at the entire Gestalt of a stimulus configuration

results in a search for similarities in a subsequently viewed stimulus set (Förster, 2009;

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Förster, Liberman, & Kuschel, 2008). Perceived similarity of targets is a key feature of

entitativity; priming Gestalt processing should therefore encourage participants to see

subsequent targets as more entitative, and to donate more generously. Because the

reference group herd is not mentioned, this type of manipulation should not affect

participants’ inferences about the proportional impact of their donations.

Method

Eighty-one participants from a large Midwestern-USA university completed a

modified Navon task that primes Gestalt versus piecemeal processing (Förster & Higgins,

2005; Förster, 2009; Navon, 1977). On the computer, participants were presented with a

series of “global” letters made up of smaller “local” letters. Over 48 trials, half were

tasked with identifying only the global letters (Gestalt condition) and half with

identifying only the local letters (piecemeal condition). (Specific details can be found in

Förster, 2009.) All participants were then presented with the 200 unrelated gazelle

scenario from Study 1a and asked for their hypothetical donation on a scale from $0 to

$55.


As predicted, Gestalt-primed participants donated more to save the 200 gazelle, M

= $14.26, SD = 16.62, than piecemeal-primed participants, M = $7.50, SD = 9.71, t(79) =

2.12, p = .037, d = .50. Similar results were found for the medians. These results support

our argument that entitativity can lead to higher donations. Donations to save 200 gazelle

were higher when they were made perceptually entitative through a Gestalt processing

prime, just as when they were conceptually entitative as a herd.

Study 2: Good Kids Versus Bad: When Entitativity Reduces Donations

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We have hypothesized that perceived entitativity causes stronger emotional

responses to a group with positive traits and hence more concern. For groups with

negative defining traits, entitativity should dampen concern, with unfortunate

implications for donations. Study 2 provides a test of this hypothesis. It also explicitly

measures entitativity and employs actual donations.

Method

Participants were 231 students from a large Midwestern-USA university who

completed this survey immediately after they were paid $15 for an unrelated experiment.

Participants read that a $300,000 facility was required to provide necessary training and

education for children in Africa. We employed a three (presentation) by two (valence)

between-participants design. The presentation factor was manipulated by the focus of the

donation appeal: a single child, six children, or six children that belonged to the same

family (six siblings). We replicated Kogut and Ritov’s method of identifying the victims

with names and pictures. Group portraits were used for the multiple victim conditions,

with identical portraits for the six children and family conditions. Pictures of single

children cut out from the group portrait were randomly assigned for the single victim

conditions (see Kogut & Ritov, 2005a, for a description). The valence factor was

manipulated by emphasizing positive traits of children in Africa or negative traits of

children in Africa that were in a prison for committing crimes. In both conditions

participants read that the facility was required to provide necessary training and education

for these children and other children like them.

Participants were asked how much of their $15 they would be willing to donate to

fund the facility on a scale from $0 to $15 in $1 increments. After the donation decision,

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participants reported their concern using the measures from Study 1a. These responses

and donation amounts were completely anonymous: Participants filled out the survey, put

it and their donation in an unmarked envelope, and left it in a box as they exited the

room. All money was delivered by the experimenter to the charitable organization.


We confirmed that the family presentation increased perceived entitativity by

asking 118 students to rate the children in the scenario on eight questions used by Brewer

et al. (2004) that tap into Campbell’s (1958) definition of entitativity (e.g. “To what

extent do you believe that the [victims] should be thought of as a whole, rather than a

collection of individual members?”). Participants provided estimates on 1 (not at all) to 9

(extremely) scales. These questions, which were originally designed to measure

entitativity of groups, do not easily lend themselves to the single victim contexts.

Therefore, we collected entitativity measures only for the family and unrelated children

conditions. As predicted, the combined measures (α = .85) differed by presentation

condition: Both negatively and positively-valenced children were perceived as more

entitative when they were presented as siblings than when they were not, F(1, 114) =

9.96, p = .002, ηp2 = .08. There was not an interaction of presentation by valence on the

measure of entitativity.

A pretest of how beautiful, pleasant, and good (α = .85) participants imagined the

victims in each condition revealed that, as expected, children in the positive valence

condition were seen as more positive than child-prisoners (see Figure 2), F(1, 216) =

20.30, p < .001, ηp2 = .09. More important, we found an interaction of presentation and

valence, F(2, 216) = 7.61, p = .001, ηp2 = .07. Contrasts revealed that the family of six

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children in the positive-valence condition was judged more positively than the unrelated

six children, F(1, 216) = 9.01, p = .003, as was the single child, F(1, 216) = 8.04, p

= .005. However, in the negative valence condition, the family was judged marginally

more negatively than the unrelated six children, F(1, 216) = 3.14, p = .078, as was the

single child, F(1, 216) = 3.95, p = .048.

A relatively small proportion (43% on average) of participants chose to donate in

this experiment. Therefore, we analyzed the data using a Tobit model (Amemiya, 1985;

Greene, 2003), examining the extent to which the presentation of the victims (one, six, or

six siblings in a family) and their valence (positive or negative) affected donations. The

Tobit model was run with zero (no donation) and 15 (total dollar donation available) as

the lower and upper limits, respectively. The results are presented in Table 1 and are

nearly identical to those obtained with a linear regression.

We are mainly interested in the interaction between how the six children were

presented (unrelated versus entitative) and valence on donations. As predicted, the

interaction between presentation and valence was significant, β = 2.55, t(225) = 2.80, p

= .006. To explore this interaction further, we examined the effect of presentation as a

family for positive and negative victims separately. In the positive valence condition, six

entitative children elicited significantly greater donations than six unrelated children, β =

2.72, t(108) = 1.91, p = .030. In contrast, six negatively-valenced children elicited

significantly lower donations when entitative than when unrelated, β = -1.94, t(117) =

2.10, p = .038. We also replicated previous findings for positive valence victims:

Participants donated significantly less money to six unrelated children than a single child

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(Kogut & Ritov, 2005a; 2005b). Donations for one and six unrelated children in the

negative valence condition were virtually identical.

As in our previous mediation analysis, we looked at the two entitative conditions

together (within valence, neither concern nor donations significantly differed based on

single vs. family presentation, p’s > .09) and confirmed that concern (α = .79) mediated

the interactive effect of valence by presentation on donations, Sobel Z = 1.93, p = .053.

These results support the entitativity explanation for our presentation effects and

reveal a limit to the positive consequences of perceived entitativity on real donations: As

predicted, participants donated less to entitative negative victims than unrelated negative

victims. We also showed that the interactive effect of presentation and valence on the

donation amount was mediated by participants’ concern for the victims, illustrating once

again that the concern that promotes charitable giving is driven by the valence and

entitativity of the victim(s).

General Discussion

Our three experiments show that people donate more to large numbers of victims

if these victims make up an entity. We suggest that entitativity increases the strength and

coherence of victims’ defining traits. Thus, victims with positive traits are viewed more

positively when entitative, increasing concern and donations. However, entitative victims

that share negative traits have the opposite effect, producing lower concern and donations

than for unrelated victims. As we have already argued, a change in the perception of the

reference group is not a viable alternative explanation for this effect. Recall that the

results of Study 1b, which relied on a perceptual manipulation of entitativity, rule out this

possibility. We also doubt the reference group explanation of our findings because it

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cannot easily account for the reversal of the effects of entitativity on donations for

victims with negative traits and for more extreme perceptions of the traits defining

entitative victims.

Recent work in this area has described the tragically muted response to multiple

victims as pervasive and impossible to repair. Slovic (2007, p. 91) writes, “Are we

destined to stand numbly and do nothing as genocide rages on for another century? Can

we overcome the psychological obstacles to action? There are no simple solutions.” Our

experiments provide some hope for resolving this problem; increase the entitativity of

large groups. For instance, rather than describing the millions of victims of malaria each

year, the appeal could describe the impact of malaria on the “country” or “village” level.

In this sense, our theory provides a solution through a bias. Small et al. (2007)

point out that it is the elevated reaction to single victims that is a bias, albeit a socially

beneficial one (see also Thaler & Sunstein, 2008). These authors show that attempts to

debias participants backfire: They reduce donations to the single identified victim. Our

results imply an intervention that does not lower donations to single victims but rather

increases reactions to multiple victims through re-biasing. However, our findings also

illustrate that the bias is not necessarily beneficial; instating the bias for groups with

negative traits lowers concern and donations.

The reversal in the effect of entitativity on donations to negatively versus

positively-valenced victims has practical as well as theoretical significance because

appeals to help victims with negative characteristics may not be uncommon: Victims are

rarely composed of only positive traits, and even victims who are viewed as positive by

some people may be viewed as negative by others. Similarly, a person’s attention will

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sometimes be drawn to the positive aspects and other times to the negative aspects of the

donation target. Depending on these factors, entitativity will trigger very different effects.

This research both directly contributes to research on charitable giving to multiple

victims and also joins a growing body of research on biases in valuation. That is, our

results reconcile the seemingly discrepant findings regarding the impact of identification

of groups on donations described in the introduction, show that the identified victim

effect generalizes to entitative groups, and suggest that Kogut and Ritov’s (2005a; 2005b)

decreasing donations for more identified victims can be attributed to decreasing

entitativity. Our findings also contribute to a more general study of valuation and scope.

For instance, Burson, Faro, and Rottenstreich (2010) find that the endowment effect

occurs only when people are endowed with a single unit of a good. They demonstrate that

a unit can be a single good or multiple goods that have been packaged together. For

example, they find an endowment effect for one chocolate, but not for 10 chocolates.

When 10 chocolates were packaged together in a box, however, the endowment effect

reemerges. Though quite different demonstrations, these two papers imply that presenting

people with an entitative unit produces biased judgments.

We opened this paper with an iconic example of a single victim, the photographed

Afghan girl, eliciting overwhelming prosocial behavior. In light of our results, we argue

that the strong reaction to this single victim may be in part driven by entitativity and that

even very large groups of victims might elicit similar responses if perceived as

sufficiently entitative. Al Gore makes a similar point in his book (2006). He quotes the

author Archibald MacLeish who wrote after seeing the first picture of the Earth from

space: “To see the Earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that ethereal silence

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where it floats, is to see ourselves riders on the Earth together, brothers on that bright

loveliness in the eternal cold—brothers who know now that they are truly brothers.” Gore

argues that MacLeish and others were so moved by this photograph that it spawned the

Environmental Movement. We add that the entitativity of the Earth presented this way

may contribute to such reactions.

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Table 1

TOBIT Coefficients for Amount of Money Donated to Target Charity

Coefficient t-statistic p-value

Full model

Constant -1.53 -2.27 .024

Valence .40 .63 .528

One vs. Six Unrelated Children .97 1.13 .260

Entitative Six vs. Six Unrelated Children .032 .04 .972

One vs. Six x Valence Interaction 1.24 1.45 .149

Entitative Six vs. Six Unrelated x Valence

Interaction

2.55 2.80 .006

Positively-Valenced Children

Constant -1.52 -1.32 .189

One vs. Six Unrelated Children 2.34 1.66 .050

Entitative Six vs. Six Unrelated Children 2.72 1.91 .030

Negatively-Valenced Children

Constant -.97 -1.54 .127

One vs. Six Unrelated Children -.18 -.22 .824

Entitative Six vs. Six Unrelated Children -1.94 -2.10 .038

Note: t-tests for contrasts within Positively-Valenced Children are single-tailed

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Figure 1

Mean Hypothetical Donations to Install a Fence Around a Preserve in Study 1A

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Figure 2

Mean Positivity Ratings of Victims in Pilot for Study 2

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while some notable exceptions exist, it is fair to say that ...prestos/downloads/dc/11-4... · web...

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