Many charitable organizations offer potential donors the option to choose their donation recipients—suggesting that organizations perceive the availability of such choice as beneficial to donation raising. Building upon research on choice aversion in the context of consumer goods and on the identifiable victim effect in the context of donation giving, we propose that the need to choose one target among multiple needy targets might, in fact, hinder donations. Results of six studies show that when prospective donors are asked to choose between two similar donation targets, they are more likely to opt out of donating altogether than when asked to donate to a single target. We show that the effect of choice on opt-out rates in donation settings is driven by the conflict between the wish to be helpful and the wish to be fair. We further show that when the conflict is resolved and the choice does not raise fairness concerns, the effect is attenuated and opt-out rates decline.

中文翻译：

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捐赠决策中选择的不利影响

许多慈善组织为潜在捐赠者提供选择其捐赠接受者的选项——这表明组织认为这种选择的可用性对募捐有益。基于对消费品背景下的选择厌恶和捐赠背景下可识别的受害者效应的研究，我们提出，在多个有需要的目标中选择一个目标的需要实际上可能会阻碍捐赠。六项研究的结果表明，当要求潜在捐赠者在两个相似的捐赠目标之间进行选择时，他们更有可能选择完全不捐赠，而不是被要求向单个目标捐赠。我们表明，在捐赠环境中选择对退出率的影响是由希望提供帮助和希望公平之间的冲突驱动的。