Beyond Charity

Beyond charity: the effect of self-transcendent emotions on donations to art, culture, science and environment. - Florian Cova (University of Geneva)

In the past years, several studies have investigated the impact of positive, self-transcendent emotions on altruistic behavior, in particular donation. These past researches have shown that inducing several of these emotions, such as elevation, gratitude, awe and feelings of being moved can motivate people to give (potential or actual) money in order to people in need. These effects have received several explanations: elevation might motivate us to become better persons, awe might diminish our feelings of self-importance, feelings of being moved might intensify social relationships, etc.

However, this literature suffers from two limitations. The first one is that the impact of self-transcendent emotions on donations has been investigated one emotion at a time (e.g. elevation separately from awe). This is problematic because stimuli that induce a given self-transcendent emotion are also very likely to induce other self-transcendent emotions. The second one is that behavioral measures of altruism have always focused on helping or giving to people in need. But self-transcendent emotions might potentially motivate us to give to other kind of causes and charities: promoting sport, art or science, or defending environment or animal wildlife. In the current state of the literature, nothing justifies the conclusion that self-transcendent emotions primarily motivate us to help others in need (rather than making us more generous in general).

Here, we present the results of a large-scale study (N=1000) that aims to correct for these shortcomings.