It seems reasonable to believe that the act of making a charitable donation requires a loving personality on the part of the donor. After all, a strong sense of compassion and empathy would be required to make the donation in the first place, right?
A French research team have explored just how far this goes in a new paper published recently. They wanted to test the impact displaying love on a collection box made to the donations received.
To do this they placed collection boxes in 14 bakeries over a 2 week period. All of the boxes contained the following text:
"Women students in business trying to organise a humanitarian action in Togo. We are relying on your support"
The only difference was that some boxes had extra words underneath the donation slot. Some had Donating=Loving, whilst others went with Donating=Helping.
People have lots of love to give
The results were quite impressive. The donating=loving boxes collected double the amount of the boxes with no text or the alternative message.
"Given the high effect-size … we can conclude that evoking love is a powerful technique to enhance people's altruistic behaviour," the researchers said.
The researchers suggest that use of the word love envokes feelings such as support, solidarity and compassion, and of course we want to act in a way that correlates with those feelings, hence we donate more.
Unfortunately what the study doesn't reveal is whether feelings of love made more people donate, or whether those that did donate were persuaded to donate more.
For such a small and affordable change however the results should nevertheless be of interest to anyone seeking donations from others.
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I love simple things like this that make a big difference.
It'd be nice for this idea to be tested a bit more rigorously. Some nice initial findings though.