Role of attentional scope on altruistic decisions

Abstract

Understanding the cognitive mechanisms involved in altruistic decisions could enable us to better comprehend complex social interactions and also help us achieve a larger social gain. I sought to identify domain-generic mechanisms that could underlie charitable donation and investigated how content-free processing style linked with scope of attention influence altruistic decision. Attention is an important cognitive process that can influence a variety of behavior including prosociality. Most previous studies are based on effects of the presence (or lack) of attention using the framework of attention as a resource. Comparatively, there has been hardly any work on how differences in scope of attention could influence altruistic decisions. The overall hypothesis of the thesis was that since global processing is linked with eager approach orientations, love, compassions, an interdependent-self model and widening of one’s thought-action repertoire; it should increase altruistic behavior. Five studies were performed to investigate how attentional scope influence altruistic decisions. Study 1 and 2 experimentally manipulated scope of attention and found that priming a broad scope of attention using a global processing style increases propensity to donate money for poor children. Study 3 found that global processing leads to increased allocation towards charities whose appeal is framed in an approach orientation compared to appeals framed in an avoidance orientation. In study 4, even when socio-economical backgrounds were matched, global processing lead to more donations in an anonymous economic game among students. Study 5, showed that real-world motivational states like love and hunger which is linked with global and local processing respectively, influence donations in predictable ways. This thesis conclusively shows that attentional mechanisms play important role in decision making. Specifically, it adds to the literature on attentional scope and perceptual processing styles by showing for the first time, global-local processing styles can influence altruistic decisions. One of the important contributions of this thesis is that some seemingly unrelated previous studies on donations and pro-social behavior can possible by seen in light of the domain-generic global-local processing framework. After discussing some limitations of these studies, I conclude with a model of attentinal broadening and highlight possible applications to other fields.by Sumitava MukherjeePh.D