Poverty Porn and Perceptions of Agency: An Experimental Assessment

For decades, scholars, non-governmental organisations and observers have expressed concern about the use of sensationalised images of people in the developing world in non-governmental organisation fundraising advertisements. They fear that these negative messages, often known as ‘poverty porn’, lead to a perception of people in developing countries as helpless and lacking in agency. Despite this ongoing concern, there has been no empirical assessment of the effect of exposure to these negative messages on the perceptions of people living in poverty in developing countries. Our research employs an online experiment of 450 UK respondents to address this gap. It examines how watching charity advertisements affects people’s perceptions of the agency of those in poverty in developing countries. We find that those who viewed negative portrayals of those in poverty were more likely to rate people in poverty lower on measures of agency. This empirically validates the criticisms of these types of negative advertisements.