Which Story Is More Worth It? The Effect of Narrative Perspective and Message Framing on Empathy and Intent to Donate

Abstract

Even with a long history of peoples prosocial behavior, it is yet unknown what exactly best motivates such behavior. Previous research into this issue has mostly focused on the relationship between emotion and prosocial behavior. However, diverse emotions are induced by different methods and so, there are differing conclusions as to what method is more effective in eliciting prosocial behavior. While some may think that there is such a diverse audience for one method to be more effective than the others, by breaking down the decision-making process of potential givers, a more plausible method may be found to motivate prosocial behavior. The current study aimed to see the effect of narrative perspectives and message framing on empathy and donation intentions. It was hypothesized that a first-person perspective and a negatively framed message would each increase empathy and thus donation intentions. In addition, it was expected that the interaction effect of the two would be most effective in encouraging prosocial behavior. Participants recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk were randomly assigned to each condition. Analysis with 50,000 bootstrap samples through Hayes PROCESS model revealed that consistent with the hypotheses, donation intention was significantly predicted by narrative perspective, empathy, and message framing. However, only the effect of message framing was mediated by empathy and there was no significant interaction effect of the two proposed factors. The current study hopes to bring attention to other emotions and mechanisms that may underlie within the factors that promote prosocial behavior.