Every penny counts: The effect of holistic-analytic thinking style on donation decisions in the times of 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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2022, Personality and Individual DifferencesCitation Excerpt :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).
The influence of self-construal on consumer responses to sizing discrepancy
2023, International Marketing ReviewHolism and Causal Responsibility: The Role of Number and Valence of Event Consequences
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