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so this research has to do with thinking about how to enhance charitable giving by motivating consumers to give that's
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sort of the first question and within that question the second question we're
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looking at is how to make them give time instead of money and so we're interested
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in factors that increase the likelihood that consumers will be more likely to give time when they're asked to donate
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as opposed to money well what we find is that when you are attempting to get consumers to give time
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a very effective strategy is to make them think about themselves as moral individuals there's two ways to do this
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one way is to trigger something internal to them so that they see themselves as moral people the other way is to provide
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them with external cues that make them think about their morality and so the combination of these two things can
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increase the likelihood that we find that they will want to give time instead of money
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well we were surprised to find that you have to be careful when you are trying to put moral Q's in front of people
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because they can be very powerful for example if you get them to start thinking about moral individuals like
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Mother Teresa sometimes what can happen is they feel like they can't reach that
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moral ideal so they end up not doing anything from a moral perspective because it's too far afield of what how
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they would want to see themselves or how they believe they could see themselves the other thing is that we have to be
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careful because sometimes if you get them to think about their moral identity they'll think about moral things they've
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done in the past and on that particular instance that you ask them to do something they'll choose not to do it
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because they have kind of built up this moral surplus and the moral bank account
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so to speak so the way you have to trigger moral thoughts is in a very subtle way to not be too powerful to
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drive these two types of effects that I just mentioned the research that we're doing suggests
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the following so if you're designing a persuasive communication let's say
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you're putting out a brochure that's part of a mass mailing then what you're
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going to want to do is you're gonna want to include in that brochure symbols and
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cues in the writing in the request for help that will that will trigger this notion of morality cues like a words
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that might be related to morality like compassion and caring and and these kinds of things these are words that
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when people read them they think about these words and how these words relate to who they are and in some instances
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that we find in the research these words just these words the presence of these words and the persuasive communication
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will trigger in their minds a sense of morality that they should do something and in turn will increase the likelihood
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that they give time I think that there's a misperception that it's too difficult to make people
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give time here's why time is a very special resource compared to money people don't want to give time to just
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anybody right so what we find in the research is that all things equal people want to give money because giving time
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has certain distinct psychological cost to it for example time is very finite money is fungible but you only have 24
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hours in the day so you're gonna choose to give that time to particular close
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others so when you're thinking about trying to get people to do something to
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give time to a pro-social cause where those benefactors are strangers then it's hard to do and people think it's
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almost impossible because the fact that giving time people have this aversion to
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doing it and what we find is that you can overcome this aversion by playing into a person's moral self or presenting
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them with cues that get them to think about themselves as moral individuals and then that overcomes us aversion to
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giving time in particular instances there's the discussion about how to give
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how to get people to give time and it turns out that folks who are part of the Millennial group tend to want to give
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time a bit more than other groups and so our research says that you know even though these Millennials want to give
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time there's an a huge group of other folks that aren't Millennials who we
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need to focus on on as well who may not have this internal sort of predisposition to want to give time and
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so our research really focuses on how to bring that other those other groups into
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the fray by motivating them to give time through what we show in our paper and that's exactly what we find in the
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research is that the act of giving time has these psychological benefits that money doesn't have so it's it's a more
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meaningful act it's more self expressive for people who are thinking about themselves as moral individuals it is
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also much more meaningful and increased happiness for people and a sense of connectedness for those who are
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receiving the time that money just can't well this research is special in the
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sense that most of the studies that are done on giving have to do with measuring
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people and measuring their behavior over time and those studies are correlational
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our study is what sets our apart our studies is the fact that when we use causal experiments and we bring people
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into the lab and we can clearly manipulate things to see what's changing their behavior and at the end of that we
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can conclude it's exactly what we were imposing on them in terms of their thought processes that actually drove
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what they did and you can't conclude that in a correlational study so I'm super interested in the role that
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moral identity plays in terms of how it relates to emotions emotions like empathy aw and these kinds of moral
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elevation experiences and so what I'm also particularly interested in is the
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idea of how does the act of giving subsequently reinforce a person's moral identity so in our paper we're looking
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at the role that moral identity plays on giving but I'd like to actually reverse
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that relationship and see to what extent are certain types of giving related to strengthening how a person sees
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themselves as a moral individual you