Nice, this matches my intuition that most people will give more if you make the reasons to give at the near construal level rather than far. I do wonder how much this generalizes, though: I would expect the effect to be much smaller if, say, you exposed people to the two stories and then one week later asked them to make the giving decision.
My guess is that philosophy is good for convincing the sort of people who will be convinced of a point in general, and narratives are great for use during specific asks, like during a fundraising event. But I’m pretty sure most people who do fundraising for non-profits already know this even if they didn’t have proof; now they have a little more.
We’re planning to do some followup studies to dig into the generalization question. We want to see if the results hold across different arguments, narratives, charity choices, etc.
Nice, this matches my intuition that most people will give more if you make the reasons to give at the near construal level rather than far. I do wonder how much this generalizes, though: I would expect the effect to be much smaller if, say, you exposed people to the two stories and then one week later asked them to make the giving decision.
My guess is that philosophy is good for convincing the sort of people who will be convinced of a point in general, and narratives are great for use during specific asks, like during a fundraising event. But I’m pretty sure most people who do fundraising for non-profits already know this even if they didn’t have proof; now they have a little more.
We’re planning to do some followup studies to dig into the generalization question. We want to see if the results hold across different arguments, narratives, charity choices, etc.