Comparing the Effect of Rational and Emotional Appeals on Donation Behavior

We present evidence from a pre-registered experiment indicating that a philosophical argument––a type of rational appeal––can persuade people to make charitable donations. The rational appeal we used follows Singer’s well-known “shallow pond” argument (1972), while incorporating an evolutionary debunking argument (Paxton, Ungar, & Greene 2012) against favoring nearby victims over distant ones. The effectiveness of this rational appeal did not differ significantly from that of a well-tested emotional appeal involving an image of a single child in need (Small, Loewenstein, and Slovic 2007). This is a surprising result, given evidence that emotions are the primary drivers of moral action, a view that has been very influential in the work of development organizations. We did not find support for our pre-registered hypothesis that combining our rational and emotional appeals would have a significantly stronger effect than either appeal in isolation. However, our finding that both kinds of appeal can increase charitable donations is cause for optimism, especially concerning the potential efficacy of well-designed rational appeals. We consider the significance of these findings for moral psychology, ethics, and the work of organizations aiming to alleviate severe poverty

Convergencia y consumo : Dino aventuras Además de la televisión

Esta investigación tiene como objetivo discutir la convergencia de medios propuesto por la serie brasilenã infantil Dino Aventuras, que también se muestra en México, España, Portugal, Rusia y Polonia, el análisis de las estrategias de aproximación con su público objetivo y la utilidad de la serie obra audiovisual mediadora de una marca en la actualidad, donde es recurrente la discusión acerca de los límites éticos de la publicidad infantil. Con la inversión de la marca Danone y utilizando Dino, mascota de los productos, es ejemplo de un proceso donde cada vez más las demarcaciones entre medios son superadas, pues se ofrece el contacto con el universo de la serie por medio de contenido disponible en Youtube, juegos para mobiles y aplicaciones como Las Aventuras de Dino, desarrollada en colaboración con la Universidad de Cataluña, revelando la creciente imprecisión de la frontera entre contenido de entretenimiento y mensajes publicitarios

Whoever Saves One Life Saves the World: Confronting the Challenge of Pseudoinefficacy

26 pagesIn a great many situations where we are asked to aid persons whose lives are endangered, we are not able to help everyone. What do we then do? In a series of experiments, we first demonstrate that donors, in general, become demotivated by information about children who cannot be helped. We find that negative affect from the children not helped decreases the warm glow associated with aiding the children who can be helped. This demotivation may be a form of “pseudoinefficacy” that is nonrational. We should not be deterred from helping whomever we can because there are others we are not able to help. Second, we show that people react in two ways to such requests. Some feel less good about helping those they can help and they help less. Others feel badly because of those “out of reach” and they become even more motivated to help whomever they can. We discuss the need to better understand these two different reactions and we suggest strategies to reduce the demotivating effects of pseudoinefficacy

Public perceptions of expert disagreement: Bias and incompetence or a complex and random world?

30 page PDFExpert disputes can present laypeople with several challenges including trying to understand why such disputes occur. In an online survey of the U.S. public, we used a psychometric approach to elicit perceptions of expert disputes for 56 forecasts sampled from seven domains (climate change, crime, economics, environment, health, politics, terrorism). People with low education, or with low self-reported knowledge of the topic, were most likely to attribute expert disputes to expert incompetence. People with higher self-reported knowledge tended to attribute disputes to expert bias due to financial or ideological reasons. The more highly educated and cognitively able were most likely to attribute disputes to natural factors, such as the irreducible complexity and randomness of the phenomenon. We highlight several important implications of these results for scientists and risk managers and argue for further research on how people perceive and grapple with expert disputes.We would like to acknowledge the generous support of the National Science Foundation: This material is based upon work supported by NSF under Grant Nos. #1231231 (Robin Gregory, PI; Nathan Dieckmann co-PI) and #0925008 (Nathan Dieckmann, PI) to Decision Research. All views expressed in this paper are those of the authors alone

Pervasive gaps in Amazonian ecological research

Biodiversity loss is one of the main challenges of our time,1,2 and attempts to address it require a clear un derstanding of how ecological communities respond to environmental change across time and space.3,4 While the increasing availability of global databases on ecological communities has advanced our knowledge of biodiversity sensitivity to environmental changes,5–7 vast areas of the tropics remain understudied.8–11 In the American tropics, Amazonia stands out as the world’s most diverse rainforest and the primary source of Neotropical biodiversity,12 but it remains among the least known forests in America and is often underrepre sented in biodiversity databases.13–15 To worsen this situation, human-induced modifications16,17 may elim inate pieces of the Amazon’s biodiversity puzzle before we can use them to understand how ecological com munities are responding. To increase generalization and applicability of biodiversity knowledge,18,19 it is thus crucial to reduce biases in ecological research, particularly in regions projected to face the most pronounced environmental changes. We integrate ecological community metadata of 7,694 sampling sites for multiple or ganism groups in a machine learning model framework to map the research probability across the Brazilian Amazonia, while identifying the region’s vulnerability to environmental change. 15%–18% of the most ne glected areas in ecological research are expected to experience severe climate or land use changes by 2050. This means that unless we take immediate action, we will not be able to establish their current status, much less monitor how it is changing and what is being lostinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

The impact of surgical delay on resectability of colorectal cancer: An international prospective cohort study

AIM: The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has provided a unique opportunity to explore the impact of surgical delays on cancer resectability. This study aimed to compare resectability for colorectal cancer patients undergoing delayed versus non-delayed surgery. METHODS: This was an international prospective cohort study of consecutive colorectal cancer patients with a decision for curative surgery (January-April 2020). Surgical delay was defined as an operation taking place more than 4 weeks after treatment decision, in a patient who did not receive neoadjuvant therapy. A subgroup analysis explored the effects of delay in elective patients only. The impact of longer delays was explored in a sensitivity analysis. The primary outcome was complete resection, defined as curative resection with an R0 margin. RESULTS: Overall, 5453 patients from 304 hospitals in 47 countries were included, of whom 6.6% (358/5453) did not receive their planned operation. Of the 4304 operated patients without neoadjuvant therapy, 40.5% (1744/4304) were delayed beyond 4 weeks. Delayed patients were more likely to be older, men, more comorbid, have higher body mass index and have rectal cancer and early stage disease. Delayed patients had higher unadjusted rates of complete resection (93.7% vs. 91.9%, P = 0.032) and lower rates of emergency surgery (4.5% vs. 22.5%, P < 0.001). After adjustment, delay was not associated with a lower rate of complete resection (OR 1.18, 95% CI 0.90-1.55, P = 0.224), which was consistent in elective patients only (OR 0.94, 95% CI 0.69-1.27, P = 0.672). Longer delays were not associated with poorer outcomes. CONCLUSION: One in 15 colorectal cancer patients did not receive their planned operation during the first wave of COVID-19. Surgical delay did not appear to compromise resectability, raising the hypothesis that any reduction in long-term survival attributable to delays is likely to be due to micro-metastatic disease

Pervasive gaps in Amazonian ecological research

Biodiversity loss is one of the main challenges of our time,1,2 and attempts to address it require a clear understanding of how ecological communities respond to environmental change across time and space.3,4 While the increasing availability of global databases on ecological communities has advanced our knowledge of biodiversity sensitivity to environmental changes,5,6,7 vast areas of the tropics remain understudied.8,9,10,11 In the American tropics, Amazonia stands out as the world's most diverse rainforest and the primary source of Neotropical biodiversity,12 but it remains among the least known forests in America and is often underrepresented in biodiversity databases.13,14,15 To worsen this situation, human-induced modifications16,17 may eliminate pieces of the Amazon's biodiversity puzzle before we can use them to understand how ecological communities are responding. To increase generalization and applicability of biodiversity knowledge,18,19 it is thus crucial to reduce biases in ecological research, particularly in regions projected to face the most pronounced environmental changes. We integrate ecological community metadata of 7,694 sampling sites for multiple organism groups in a machine learning model framework to map the research probability across the Brazilian Amazonia, while identifying the region's vulnerability to environmental change. 15%–18% of the most neglected areas in ecological research are expected to experience severe climate or land use changes by 2050. This means that unless we take immediate action, we will not be able to establish their current status, much less monitor how it is changing and what is being lost

Pseudoinefficacy: negative feelings from children who cannot be helped reduce warm glow for children who can be helped

article published online, 17 page PDFIn a great many situations where we are asked to aid persons whose lives are endangered, we are not able to help everyone. What are the emotional and motivational consequences of “not helping all”? In a series of experiments, we demonstrate that negative affect arising from children that could not be helped decreases the warm glow of positive feeling associated with aiding the children who can be helped. This demotivation from the children outside of our reach may be a form of “pseudoinefficacy” that is non-rational. We should not be deterred from helping whomever we can because there are others we are not able to help.This material is based upon work supported by the U. S. National Science Foundation under Grant Nos. SES-1227729 and SES-1427414, and by the Swedish Research Council

An Introspection Intervention for Perceived Inefficacy in Charitable Giving

Observed biases in how people value human life have sparked an area of research investigating the mental processes leading to the devaluing of mass suffering. Parallel lines of research in psychology, economics, marketing, and environmental sciences are seeking to understand why people act to help others at all. The emotional and deliberative process in contexts of giving behaviors are complex and evolving. This dissertation focuses on one such bias: pseudoinefficacy, or the dampening of anticipated positive affect from giving, driven by the sense that we cannot help everyone at risk in given context. First a literature review of the relevant studies and previous work on the concept of “warm glow” is presented. Next, two studies are described that were conducted in an effort to replicate previous findings and test a possible de-biasing intervention: structured introspection. A structured introspection task that asked participants to think deeply about the factors influencing their prosocial decisions was tested against instructions to deliberate and against a no-instruction control. Results were mixed. The pseudoinefficacy manipulation failed to replicate previous findings of dampened positive affect by being reminded of individual outside of reach for help. The introspection condition showed no obvious benefit in a one-shot donation paradigm. However, a study on blood donation found a significant increase in self-efficacy from the introspective task, leading to greater intentions to donate, and indirectly increasing actual donation behavior compared to the other conditions. An exploration of the data and future directions are discussed