SC Connecticut News

There’s a reason charity advertisements often revolve around a specific person: an upsetting picture or story is more likely to elicit donations than statistics or depictions of a group’s collective plight. Psychologists refer to our tendency to open our hearts and wallets wider for specific people than we do for generalized ones as the “identifiable victim effect.”

Yale SOM’s Deborah Small, who studies the areas where consumer choice, moral judgment, and prosocial behavior overlap, has devoted several research projects to exploring the intricacies of the identifiable victim effect. In one study, she tested what happened when potential donors were informed about the biases driven by the identifiable victim effect; she found that rather than trying to balance their giving by being more generous to the unidentified, subjects simply gave less to identifiable ones. In another, she examined how the facial expressions of people portrayed in charitable advertisements impacted donations.

Over the course of these projects, people often raised a separate controversy around the ethics of soliciting aid via graphic depictions of human suffering. Critics have labeled such tactics as harmful “poverty porn,” decrying such images as exploitative, objectifying, and deceptive. As Small considered these moral objections, she wondered about their pervasiveness.

“I’m interested not just in how people behave but also in people's ethical intuitions about what's right and wrong,” Small says. “I was curious as to whether those criticisms were intuitively shared by most laypeople—and if so, why?”

She also wondered where potential donors drew the line when it comes to such advertisements. Does it matter how accurate the disturbing images are? Are emotional manipulation or white lies acceptable if they’re for a good cause?

Small and Shannon Duncan, a PhD candidate at the Wharton School of Business, and Emma Levine of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, who is currently a visiting faculty member at Yale SOM, conducted a series of studies that asked participants to rate the acceptability of various aid organization marketing tactics. Their results were clear and consistent: most people saw little problem with charitable organizations leveraging the “identifiable victim effect” and including real people in their marketing campaigns—with one big exception: “On average, people think this is fine,” Small says, “except when it involves deception.”

The researchers’ approach enabled them to dig deeper into insights from their consecutive experiments. By their final experiments, they broke down "deception" into ever-more-specific definitions to discern which aspect most bothered observers.

The first step Small and her co-authors undertook was specifying what’s meant when critics charge an organization with disseminating “poverty porn.” They read numerous critiques and coded them upon noticing that accusations could be sorted into two categories: exploitation/objectification (focusing on how subjects could be harmed) or manipulation/deception (concerned with how potential donors are harmed).

With these categories in mind, researchers created questionnaires asking subjects to evaluate ethical acceptability of various tactics under "poverty porn." In initial studies, subjects rated five tactics potentially employed by charities: using an actor to depict someone in need; using stereotypical images; staging photographs; using celebrities; or depicting recipients' worst moments. Subjects rated each strategy on a seven-point scale from “not acceptable at all” to “completely acceptable.”

These initial studies revealed that tactics involving deception (using actors or staging photos) were judged less acceptable than those characterized by stereotyping or objectifying (showing worst moments or relying on stereotypes).

“Once we saw that primary objection was deception,” Small says,“that led us really want understand what about deception was bothering people.”

In charity advertising context researchers considered artificial tactic one recreates imitates reality—for example hiring child actor photo shoot village need aid misleading tactic uses photos child indeed lives village served cherry-picks worst-off youngster photo shoot They asked subjects rate acceptability scenarios while varying whether survey respondents informed child photo represented typical situation village most-extreme case

Small fascinated results suggested subjects much more bothered any whiff artificiality tactics even say child actor did represent close approximation reality they were about misleading strategies when photo wasn’t attempting represent typical situation

These findings sufficiently surprising Small now working new research delve deeper ethical judgements deception advertising For next research project expanding beyond charity advertising look evaluations standard marketing campaigns In one survey participants asked evaluate ads weight-loss program Which more ethically acceptable ad showing before-and-after images client who's lost most weight ad featuring someone never used program The judgments follow similar pattern respondents judge more artificial ads more harshly But those view ad subject genuine but atypical have less accurate view product

“The people who are most misled are those who see misrepresentative ads,” Small says,“But in their ethical judgements people still think strategy more acceptable one.”