Study 1 indicated that, on a college campus, describing blood donations as a way to “prevent a death” rather than “save a life” boosted the donation rate. Study 2 showed that framing a charity’s appeals as helping people to avoid a loss led to larger expected donations, increased intentions to volunteer, and more helping behavior, independent of other emotional motivators.

Two studies investigated the effects of message framing on helping intentions and behaviors. With the help and collaboration of the Red Cross, Study 1, a field experiment, directly assessed the effectiveness of a call for blood donations that was presented as either death-preventing (losses) or life-saving (gains), and as being of either more or less urgent need. With the help and collaboration of a local charity, Study 2, a lab experiment, assessed the effects of the gain-versus-loss framing of a donation-soliciting flyer on individuals’ expectations of others’ monetary donations as well their own volunteering behavior. Study 2 also assessed the effects of three emotional motivators - feelings of empathy, positive affect, and relational closeness.

Chronic blood shortages in the U.S. would be alleviated by small increases, in percentage terms, of people donating blood. The current research investigated the effects of subtle changes in charity-seeking messages on the likelihood of people responses to a call for help. We predicted that “avoid losses” messages would lead to more helping behavior than “promote gains” messages would.

Introduction

Each year, people donate billions of dollars to charity, as well as enough blood to prevent millions of unnecessary deaths [1]. In general, people are helpful [2]. Charities, however, have recently encountered the reality of an economic downturn, with donations in 2010 experiencing their worst drop (11%) in two decades. One of the top ten charities in the U.S., for instance, experienced a 40% drop in their donations [3].

Some charities, however, have fared better than others. Four of the top ten charities in the U.S., for instance, actually experienced increases in donations during 2010. An informal analysis indicates that the appeals of all of the six top charities that experienced donation decreases stressed their recipients’ needs for gains: “to ensure every child has a quality education” (UnitedWay Giving), “doing the most good” (Slavation Army), “to provide immediate relief and vital services” (Food for the Poor), “to further the American tradition of philanthropy” (Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund), “to continue saving lives” (American Cancer Society), and to fund “life-changing programs that help millions of children, adults and families” (The Y ). In sharp contrast, the appeals of the four top charities that experienced donation increases all focused on their recipients’ losses if help was not forthcoming: they solicited help for people “in crisis around the world” (AmeriCare Foundation), to “prevent them from going hungry” (Feed the Children), and to “reduce poverty in America” (Catholic Charities USA), which causes “more than half of the child deaths worldwide” (World Vision ). Although all ten organizations crafted their appeals in hopes of motivating the same behavior – donations – they differed markedly in their gain-loss framing. The current paper investigates the effects of this dichotomy directly. In particular, we apply the lens of prospect theory [4] to investigate whether subtle changes in charitable messages could influence people’s responses to a call for help.

A substantial stream of work has investigated the persuasive effectiveness of the content of a message as well as its framing on people’s individual choices, especially for promoting health behaviors [5]–[8]. For instance, help-seeking messages that evoke empathy, that create positive emotional feelings in the audience, or that connect them, relationally, to the recipient of their help have all been shown to increase helping behavior [9]–[17]. However, research has only rarely examined whether the framing of a help-seeking message can also influence interpersonal, helping behaviors [18]. Thus, the current research combines a well-established cognitive bias and a pressing societal predicament, as blood shortages are a recurring challenge. An increase of only 1% more of the American population giving blood every year would reduce national blood shortages to zero [1]. Thus, the effective framing of charitable messages may have the potential to substantially increase blood donations and prevent unnecessary deaths.

Framing the Consequences: Behavioral Implications and Effects Prospect theory suggests that the pain of losing is about twice as strong as the joy of gaining the same amount [19]. As a result, people tend to be more motivated to avoid losses than they are to achieve comparable gains [4]. Of three clear methods of framing risky choices [5], Kahneman and Tversky’s seminal paper introduced risky choice framing, i.e., altering the risks ascribed to different choice options, as a potentially potent means for changing individuals’ decisions [4]. Attribute framing, the second method, focuses on the valence of a target’s characteristics, e.g., by presenting either the success or the failure rates of different choice options [20]. Finally, goal framing focuses on the consequences of a given behavior, presenting a goal as either obtaining positive consequences or avoiding negative consequences. The current research focuses on the effects of goal framing on helping behavior, for two reasons. First, helping behaviors do not always engender risks; and second, even if charities can report success or failure statistics, every call for help tends to have a goal. Thus, goal framing is directly pertinent to the domain of helping behaviors, as well as being practical. The differential framing of a goal, as achieving success or avoiding failure, is also likely to have an impact on helping behavior. Research has suggested, for instance, that messages emphasizing potential losses are more effective than messages emphasizing potential gains at persuading people to engage in self-benefiting behaviors [21], especially when the stakes are high [5]. For example, women who read pamphlets that emphasized the negative consequences of not engaging in breast self-examination did more self-examinations than women who read about their positive consequences [21]. Similarly, college students who were warned about the risks of heart disease expressed stronger intentions to get cholesterol tests when the warning message was framed negatively than when it was framed positively [6]. The current research investigates whether goal framing effects can be extended from self- to other-oriented behaviors. In particular, the goal of blood donations could be described as either “to save a life” or “to prevent a death.” While the act and the consequences of donating blood remain the same, we predicted that these two messages would lead to different reactions, with seeking “avoid loss” goals leading to more helping behavior than “promote gain” goals. Early research on helping intentions supports this prediction. Lee and Murnighan asked undergraduates to read scenarios in which a colleague was facing either a monetary gain or an equivalent monetary loss [22]. The scenarios indicated that students could intervene and help their colleague to either obtain the monetary gain or avoid the monetary loss. Self-report measures showed that help was significantly more likely when it could help to avoid a monetary loss than to obtain a monetary gain. In addition, because feelings of empathy mediated these effects, Lee and Murnighan presented their empathy-prospect model, which predicted that people would be most likely to help when feelings of empathy were strong and the target faced a loss rather than a gain (particularly a severe loss) [22]. The current research was designed to extend the model in two important ways. First, we provided a more systematic look at the framing effect by assessing potential helpers’ reactions to objectively identical messages, which also matches the kinds of predicaments that charities encounter, i.e., how to best promote a particular cause. Second, we investigated whether the differential framing of charitable messages could affect helping intentions as well as actual helping behaviors. Because helping intentions do not always translate into helping behavior [23], the practical value of successfully encouraging actual helping behavior may be especially significant.

The Current Research We present two studies that investigated the effects of loss framing on helping intentions and behaviors. With the help and collaboration of the Red Cross, Study 1, a field experiment, directly assessed the effectiveness of a call for blood donations that was presented as either death-preventing (losses) or life-saving (gains), and as being of either more or less urgent need. With the help and collaboration of a local charity, Study 2, a lab experiment, assessed the effects of the gain-versus-loss framing of a donation-soliciting flyer on individuals’ expectations of others’ monetary donations as well their own volunteering behavior. Study 2 also tested the robustness of the loss framing effect by assessing its independence from other emotional motivators. Together, the results not only extend the theoretical implications of message framing, they also create a new, action-oriented imperative for helping behavior.