Summon Sisyphus Influence

After reviewing the large body of past research on how people choose which charities to contribute to, researchers at University of Leeds, Singapore Management University, University of British Columbia, and Virginia Tech report a criterion which at first glance is counterintuitive: Everything else being equal, donors prefer recipient charities to be less than fully capable of meeting the charity’s objectives.
     This charity capacity curse seems strange until you recognize how prospective donors perceive charities with abundant financial, human resources, and organizational capacity as needing less help. Most people depend on their perceptions of need in choosing among charities, even though this strategy often ends up compromising the effectiveness of their contributions.
     An implication of the finding is for charities to downplay their existing capabilities when appealing for help. But a danger in doing this is that people consulting online guides to develop their giving strategy will see how ratings of a charity are based largely on the quality of the charity’s capabilities.
     Results from follow-on studies by the researchers argue for using two other strategies to break the charity capacity curse’s effect on prospective donors when the charity is considered as having high capacities: 

• Make the current needs of the charity highly salient. In the studies, this was achieved by describing an unexpected natural disaster to which the charity is responding. 
• Shift the donors’ focus from the need of the charity to the impact of the decision to contribute. In the studies, this was achieved by using phrases like “help the most people,” “make a greater impact on the community,” and “create the most benefits.”

     Other research finds parallels to the charity capacity curse with charity recipients. Generally, the positive reaction to an attractive solicitor increases contributions. But a University of Alberta study found an exception to that rule. Researchers set up a set of fictitious websites on which visitors were asked to financially sponsor a child from a developing country.
     When the children were portrayed as having severe needs, facial attractiveness made no difference in the willingness to help. But when the level of need was not severe, people demonstrated less compassion for attractive than for unattractive children. The researchers attribute this effect to people assuming that attractive children would be better able to recruit help on their own.
     Similarly, showing typical child beneficiaries as a group makes them seem more powerful than showing them as solitary individuals.

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