Case Report
Framing an altruistic action in periodic (versus aggregate) terms reduces people's moral evaluation of the act and the actor

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Abstract

Charities often express altruistic acts as a series of periodic payments (“donate $10 per month”) as opposed to aggregating them over a longer period (“donate $120 per year”). Five experiments (three preregistered, N = 1479) test whether the framing of an altruistic act affects observers' moral judgment of the act and the actor. Observers perceive a donation as less moral (Experiment 1) and the donor to have lower moral character (Experiments 2a & 2b) when altruistic actions are framed in periodic rather than aggregate terms. An aggregate-framed act increases observers' perception of the donors' sacrifice and the perceived magnitude of their help to the beneficiary. Experiment 3 finds that these two factors can explain the effect of framing on moral judgment. However, donors may hold incorrect intuitions about observers' moral judgment. Experiment 4 shows that donors predict that observers' moral judgment would depend on their decision to donate but not on the appeal to which they respond. The results enrich our understanding of the consequences of using periodic framing of donations, a widespread practice in the marketplace.

Introduction

Charities often frame donation appeals as a series of periodic payments (“donate $1 a day”) instead of aggregating them over a longer period (“donate $365 a year”). For instance, the United Nations Children's Fund tells its prospective donors in the United Kingdom (UK) that “just £16 each month” can help provide life-saving vaccines to children (United Nations Children's Fund, 2019), and the relief agency CARE suggests making a $19 monthly donation can create a “lasting difference” (CARE, 2019). Such temporal (time-based) framing of donation appeals is a good idea. Research has shown that people are more likely to donate in response to a periodic appeal compared with an aggregate appeal (Atlas & Bartels, 2018; Gourville, 1998, Gourville, 1999, Gourville, 2003).

In the present research, we ask a different question – can the temporal frame used to describe an altruistic act affect observers' judgments? We propose that viewing an altruistic act framed in periodic (versus aggregate) terms reduces people's moral judgment of both the act and the actor. We examine whether lower moral judgment is related to inferences about donors' intention to sacrifice a personal resource for the greater good (Haidt, 2007; Nelkin, 2016) and the extent to which donations make a difference to recipients (Small, Loewenstein, & Slovic, 2007). Finally, we test whether donors can correctly gauge that observers evaluate their prosocial actions based not only on whether they donate but also on the donation frame to which they respond.

Although the objective donation amount and the actual payment schedule do not depend on the temporal frame, past research suggests that periodic framing positively affects donation behavior (Atlas & Bartels, 2018; Gourville, 1998, Gourville, 1999, Gourville, 2003). In early research, Gourville (1998) found that participants were more likely to donate when presented with a donation appeal framed as “$1 per day” compared with “$350 per year”. A periodic appeal is more likely to bring to mind small ongoing expenses, such as the cost of a daily cup of coffee, easing the decision to donate. More recently, Atlas and Bartels (2018) corroborated the above finding. They showed that participants who viewed a periodic appeal (“$2.5 per day”) indicated a greater willingness to donate compared to those who viewed an aggregate appeal (“$900 per year”), driven by a belief that responding to a periodic frame will allow them to gain recurring (possibly daily) utility by donating.

In the present study, we take the perspective of an observer who views an altruistic act framed either in periodic or aggregate terms. When evaluating numerical attributes, people often pay greater attention to numbers rather than other contextual information, such as units (Bagchi & Davis, 2016; Basu & Ng, 2021; Pelham, Sumarta, & Myaskovsky, 1994). Given that an aggregate frame represents the overall donation amount using a larger number, people might use this largeness of the number as a signal for the morally praiseworthiness of the altruistic act. However, we contend that greater moral praise is not simply an outcome of a mistaken belief that the aggregate-framed act is objectively larger in magnitude. Instead, we argue that observers use the largeness of the number to make inferences about two different facets of the altruistic act.

One possibility is that when an observer views a person donating, they might ask themselves the following question: how difficult was it for the donor to make this donation (Nelkin, 2016)? If a donor donates despite facing greater difficulty in doing so, the donation might signal the donor's willingness to sacrifice a personal resource to effect a greater good, the cornerstone of moral behavior (Haidt, 2007; Nelkin, 2016; Sachdeva, Iliev, Ekhtiari, & Dehghani, 2015). Compared to a donor responding to a periodic appeal, one responding to an aggregate appeal has no available comparisons with trivial ongoing expenses to cushion the pain that they might experience in parting with their money (Gourville, 1998). Thus, an observer might perceive that it is more difficult to comply with an aggregate appeal. Past research suggests that observers' moral judgments are the results of what they can infer from an agent's action (Critcher, Helzer, & Tannenbaum, 2020; Cushman, 2008). An observer might infer that the donor had a higher intention for self-sacrifice when their act was framed in aggregate terms, thus elevating moral judgment.

An alternative question that the observer might ask is the following: how much benefit is the donor providing to the beneficiary of the altruistic act? Past research suggests that people are sensitive to this factor. People are generally less willing to donate if they feel that their donations make little difference to the recipients (drop in the bucket effect; Small et al., 2007) and favor identifiable beneficiaries over statistical ones (Lee & Feeley, 2016). The larger number used to describe the act in the aggregate frame may magnify the extent of help that the donor is providing, which, in turn, may positively affect moral judgments.

A rich body of research has shown that moral acts are, at least in part, motivated by reputational concerns (Griskevicius, Tybur, & Van den Bergh, 2010; Harbaugh, 1998; Johnson & Park, 2021; Uhlmann, Pizarro, & Diermeier, 2015), even when actors know that they are not being watched (Jordan & Rand, 2020). If observers evaluate aggregate framed donations as more moral, why has research found that periodic appeals perform better (Atlas & Bartels, 2018; Gourville, 1998)? In answering this question, we drew from the literature on metaperceptions that has documented people consistently mispredicting how others perceive their actions (Moon, Gan, & Critcher, 2020; Savitsky, Epley, & Gilovich, 2001; Scopelliti, Loewenstein, & Vosgerau, 2015; Sezer, Gino, & Norton, 2018). For instance, people systematically underestimate the positive effects of their compliments (Boothby & Bohns, 2021) and overestimate the negative effects of their failures (Moon et al., 2020; Savitsky et al., 2001) on others. We explore the possibility that donors do not clearly understand the factors on which observers judge them.

Observers pay attention to both aspects of a donation, i.e., whether someone donates or not, as documented by Klein and Epley (2014), and the frame to which they comply, as we predict. However, when facing a donation decision, donors might mistakenly believe that the actual act of donation – their behavior – is more important to observers compared to the appeal to which they respond. They may not appreciate that observers may evaluate complying with an aggregate appeal as more moral. In other words, donors may believe that only outcomes matter to observers, contrary to research suggesting that both outcomes (Klein & Epley, 2014) and actors' intentions (Critcher et al., 2020; Inbar, Pizarro, & Cushman, 2012) matter to them. To the extent that reputational concerns drive altruistic acts, donors' incorrect intuition may then favor periodic appeals as these make it easier to donate, thus allowing them to signal selfless behavior (Gourville, 1998).

Section snippets

The current research

We test these predictions across five experiments. We examine whether framing an altruistic act in periodic terms (versus aggregate terms) lowers the moral judgment of the act (Experiment 1, preregistered) and moral character judgment of the donor (Experiments 2a & 2b). We next test the two potential reasons for the effect in Experiment 3 (preregistered) - the perceived personal sacrifice of the donor and the perceived magnitude of the benefit to the recipient. Finally, we test whether donors

Experiment 1

This experiment tested whether observers perceive donations framed in periodic (versus aggregate) terms as less moral. We preregistered the hypothesis, sample size, measures, and statistical tests for this experiment on the Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/3zfnx).

Experiment 2

People's moral evaluation of an action might sometimes differ from their evaluation of the actor's moral character (Tannenbaum, Uhlmann, & Diermeier, 2011; Uhlmann et al., 2015). In particular, it remains unclear whether character judgments depend on the perceived largeness of an altruistic act. For instance, Klein and Epley (2014) found that people are insensitive to the magnitude of an altruistic act. Participants evaluated a person who donated $10 as more moral than one who did not donate at

Experiment 3

In this experiment, we tested two potential inferences that might be related to the lower moral judgment of a donation framed in periodic terms – the perceived sacrifice of the donor and the perceived benefit to the recipient (Johnson, 2020; Rubaltelli, Hysenbelli, Dickert, Mayorga, & Slovic, 2020). We preregistered the hypothesis, sample size, measures, and exclusions for this experiment on the Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/m8dq7).

Experiment 4

In their moral judgments, observers consider whether a donor donates or not, as shown by Klein and Epley (2014), and the appeal to which the donors respond, as previous experiments show. However, are donors aware of these factors that observers use in their judgments?

In this experiment, we presented participants with a donation appeal, framed either in aggregate or periodic terms. We asked participants the extent to which an observer would judge their act as moral if they chose to donate and if

General discussion

The results from this research show that observers have a lower moral evaluation of donations framed in periodic (versus aggregate) terms. Observers evaluated donations to be less moral (Experiment 1) and the donor to be less warm (Experiment 2a) and less moral (Experiment 2b) when donations were framed in periodic terms. Such lower moral judgment was related to perceived lower personal sacrifice of the donor and less benefits provided to the recipients (Experiment 3). Conversely, donors

Open Practices

Data and code for all experiments are available at https://osf.io/msqx2. Preregistrations are available at https://osf.io/3zfnx (Experiment 1), https://osf.io/m8dq7 (Experiment 3), and https://osf.io/6cuzw (Experiment 4).

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Li Shi Tan, Shilpa Madan, Aulona Ulqinaku, Krishna Savani, Honghan Qi, and seminar participants at Leeds University Business School for their comments at various stages of this research, and the review team for their insightful feedback during the review process.

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