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Does the evaluability bias hold when giving to animal charities?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2023

Glen William Spiteri*
Affiliation:
Department of Psychological and Behavioural Sciences, London School of Economics and Political ScienceDepartment of Economics, University of MaltaDepartment of Business, Entrepreneurship and Finance, Saint Martin’s Institute of Higher Education
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Abstract

When evaluating a charity by itself, people tend to overweight overhead costs inrelation to cost-effectiveness. However, when evaluating charities side by side,they base their donations on cost-effectiveness. I conducted a replication andextension of Caviola et al. (2014; Study 1) using a 3 (HighOverhead/Effectiveness, Low Overhead/Effectiveness, Both) x 2 (Humans, Animals)between-subjects design. I found that the overhead ratio is an easier attributeto evaluate than cost-effectiveness in separate evaluation, and, in jointevaluation, people allocate donations based on cost-effectiveness. This effectwas observed for human charities, and to a lesser extent, for animalcharities.

Information

Type
Research Article
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
The authors license this article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors [2022] This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Figure 0

Figure 1:Procedure Diagram.

Figure 1

Figure 2:Average Donations (£) in separate evaluation versus joint evaluation where OH/E denotes overhead/effectiveness. Error bars represent standard errors of the means.

Figure 2

Figure 3:Average Donations (£) in separate evaluation versus joint evaluation where OH/E denotes overhead/effectiveness. Error bars represent standard errors of the means.