Every penny counts: The effect of holistic-analytic thinking style on donation decisions in the times of Covid-19

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2021.110713Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Individuals with holistic thinking decided to donate more for Covid-19 causes.

  • This effect was found beyond constructs related to donation such as self-construal.

  • The underlying mechanism is the perception that the contribution can make a change.

  • These findings extend to real donation decisions in times of Covid-19.

Abstract

This research explores how individual differences in holistic-analytic thinking style affect people's donation intentions and decisions. Specifically, we find that individuals with a more holistic thinking style are more likely to make donations compared to individuals with a less holistic thinking style, and the effect is mediated by the belief that every penny counts. In the first two studies, we examine the impact of cognitive style on donation for a Covid-19-related cause. This context is important because ensuring that individual donors believe their contributions matter is crucial when raising donations for a cause that impacts a large number of beneficiaries, such as fighting Covid-19. We establish the underlying mechanism of the impact of cognitive style on donation intention and donation amount. A third study shows that our findings can be extended beyond the context of Covid-19 and generalized to other nonprofit projects. In conclusion, taking into account an individual-difference variable, such as holistic-analytic thinking style, is important to explain donation decisions and might be worth considering when designing and implementing social interventions, especially during pandemic situations like the one produced by Covid-19.

Section snippets

Study 1

Study 1 aims to provide initial evidence that people who have a more holistic thinking style are more likely to donate to nonprofits for a Covid-19 cause. Previous literature has shown that donation decision (and other prosocial behaviors) may be influenced by the individual's self-construal (Agerström & Björklund, 2009; Winterich & Barone, 2011). Evidence suggests that individuals with interdependent self-construal had a more favorable attitude towards nonprofits' advertisement and were more

Study 2

Study 2 had three main objectives. First, we sought stronger evidence that holistic-analytic thinking style had an influence on donation by using an incentive-compatible decision. In this study, participants were told that they could receive a bonus for participating in the study, then indicated their decision to donate the bonus to a nonprofit with a Covid-19 cause. They indicated their decision to donate knowing that if they were among the winners of the bonus, the amount indicated would

Study 3

Because of its local impact to various nations and also its worldwide impact, Covid-19 is a unique situation where the extent of its direct and indirect consequences can be relatively close to each individual. Furthermore, in these circumstances, the media reports daily on the state of the pandemic, which causes people to keep the alarming situation actively in mind. In study 3, we showed that the influence of holistic-analytic thinking style on donation can extend to other charitable projects

General discussion

Our results showed that individuals' cognitive style could influence their donation decisions, especially for a cause with a large scope, such as Covid-19. In the first two studies, we obtained evidence that individuals with a more holistic thinking style, compared to those with a less holistic thinking style, were more likely to want to make donations to a Covid-19 related cause, while ruling out potential alternative accounts based on self-construal. We also provided support to our proposed

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Xiaozhou (Zoe) Zhou: Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing, Methodology. Blanca Requero: Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing, Methodology. Dilney Gonçalves: Funding acquisition, Resources, Writing – review & editing. David Santos: Conceptualization, Project administration, Writing – review & editing, Supervision.

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      The last dimension is locus of attention, which places the focus on “the big picture,” considering the elements of the stimulus as a whole (rather than decomposing the stimulus in their parts, Miyamoto et al., 2006). This scale has been widely used to show the impact of holistic-analytic thinking on a wide range of domains like self-identity (Martin & Shao, 2016), well-being and satisfaction (Chen & Murphy, 2019; Ng et al., 2021), emotion experience (Larsen et al., 2017; Santos et al., 2021), consumer behavior (Allman et al., 2019), donation behavior (Zhou et al., 2021), environmental concern (Ito & Li, 2019; Sacchi et al., 2016), or performance creativity (Chen, 2020), just to mention a few examples. Furthermore, the role of the AHS varies as a function of the context, and can serve as predictor, outcome, mediator, or moderator of other variables of interest (see Koo et al., 2018, for a review).

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