Charitable Giving to Controllable Misfortunes: The Role of Deliberation and Victim Identifiability

Causal controllability is the degree to which an observer of another person’s misfortune perceives that misfortune to be the fault or responsibility of the person in need of help. When a person encounters another in need of help, the person spontaneously judges the causal controllability (Weiner 1985). When the need is caused by an uncontrollable circumstance, sympathy is elicited, and the perceiver is likely to help the victim; in contrast, when the need is caused by a controllable circumstance, anger and blame are evoked, and the perceiver is likely to withhold help giving (Weiner 1980). Based on this theory, a nonprofit organization’s message is likely to be more effective if it communicates uncontrollability of the need. However, social causes that nonprofit organizations attempt to aid are not always uncontrollable. For example, causes having a mentalbehavioral origin such as drug abuse and obesity are considered to be controllable (Weiner, Perry, and Magnusson 1988), and it is difficult to solicit donations for those causes because they tend to elicit perceivers’ anger and blame toward the victims. How can we decrease people’s negative evaluations toward the victim of the controllable misfortune and increase people’s willingness to help the victim? Drawing on the literature of the identifiable victim effect (Small and Loewenstein 2003) and the feeling- versus deliberationbased mode of processing (Hsee and Rottenstreich 2004), we propose that when a cause is construed as controllable, a charitable request that excludes the victim’s personal information and evokes a potential donor’s cognitive deliberation will increase donations.