Self-serving perception of charitable donation request: An effective cognitive strategy to boost benefits and reduce drawbacks

Abstract

The psychological consequences of prosocial behavior depend on people's perceptions of their own volition. Building on this, we hypothesized that people who donate increase their volition and the benefits of donations by judging donation requests as polite (non-coercive), whereas non-donors reduce their volition and the drawback of refusing to donate by judging the request as less polite (too coercive). Three weeks after providing baseline politeness judgments about a fundraising request, participants re-evaluated the same request as potential donors (experimental group) or observers (control group) and reported how they felt (N_time1 = 605, N_time2 = 294). Relative to past perceptions, donors judged the request as more polite than control participants. Non-donors redefined the request as less polite than donors, but not less than control participants. Both donors and non-donors benefited from redefining the request as more polite. We discuss how altering one's perception of a request is a multi-purpose self-serving cognition.