Charity Begins at Home: How Incremental Theory Enhances or Reduces Charitable Giving

People’s generosity declines with the self-other distance (Dovidio et al. 1997; Jones and Rachlin 2006). While the negative impact of distance on prosocial outcome is well understood, can the perception of distance between self and others chronically differ? In this research, we demonstrate that subscribing to incremental theory (vs. entity theory) leads to higher charitable intention, and such effect arises because the beneficiaries viewed as changeable, as in the lenses of incremental theorists, feel closer to the self. Individuals differ in the extent to which they view human qualities as malleable (Dweck, Chiu, and Hong 1995). While incremental theorists believe that people can change and improve who they are, entity theorists view others to be consistent across time and situation. Consequently, incremental theorists’ impressions of others constitute the contextualized factors (e.g., situation and needs), whereas entity theorists seek to assess the unchanging, global traits (e.g., personality and ability) of others (Molden, Plaks, and Dweck 2006). Such low- (vs. high-) level focus is known to embody the construal of proximate (vs. distant) others (Nussbaum, Trope, and Liberman 2003; Rim, Uleman, and Trope 2009). In the similar vein, entity theorists were shown to endorse the stereotypes more readily (Hong et al. 2004), and incremental theorists accord more individuating elements to out-group members (Levy, Chiu, and Hong 2006). All evidence taken together suggests that compared to incremental theorists, entity theorists have a clearer demarcation between self and other, which is a traditional hallmark of social distance (Liviatan, Trope, and Liberman 2008).