Narrative Stories Are More Effective Than Philosophical Arguments in Convincing Research Participants to Donate to Charity

A new paper of mine, hot off the presses at Philosophical Psychology, with collaborators Christopher McVey and Joshua May:

"Engaging Charitable Giving: The Motivational Force of Narrative Versus Philosophical Argument" (freely available final manuscript version here)

Chris, who was then a PhD student here at UC Riverside, had the idea for this project back in 2014 or 2015. He found my work on the not-especially-ethical behavior of ethics professors interesting, but maybe too negative in its focus. Instead of emphasizing what doesn't seem to have any effect on moral behavior, could I turn my attention in a postive direction? Even if philosophical reflection ordinarily has little impact on one's day-to-day choices, maybe there are conditions under which it can have an effect. What might those conditions be?

Chris (partly under the influence of Martha Nussbaum's work) was convinced that narrative storytelling could bring philosophy powerfully to life, changing people's ethical choices and their lived understanding of the world. In his teaching, he used storytelling to great effect, and he thought we might be able to demonstrate the effectiveness of philosophical storytelling empirically too, using ordinary research participants.

Chris thus developed a simple experimental paradigm in which research participants are exposed to a stimulus -- either a philosophical argument for charitable giving, a narrative story about a person whose life was dramatically improved by a charitable organization, both the argument and the narrative, or a control text (drawn from a middle school physics textbook) -- and then given a surprise 10% chance of receiving $10. Participants could then choose to donate some portion of that $10 (should they receive it) to one of six effective charities. Chris found that participants exposed to the argument donated about the same amount as those in the control condition -- about $4, on average -- while those exposed to the narrative or the narrative plus argument donated about $1 more, with the narrative-plus-argument showing no detectable advantage over the narrative alone.

We also developed a five-item scale for measuring attitude toward charitable donation, with similar results: Expressed attitude toward charitable donation was higher in the narrative condition than in the control condition, while the argument-alone condition was similar to the control condition and the narrative-plus-argument condition was similar to the narrative alone. In other words, exposure to the narrative appeared to shift both attitude and behavior, while argument seemed to be doing no work either on its own or when added to the narrative.

For this study, the narrative was the true story of Mamtha, a girl whose family was saved from slavery in a sand mine by the actions of a charitable organization. The argument was a Peter-Singer-style argument for charitable giving, adapted from Buckland, Lindauer, Rodriguez-Arias, and Veliz 2021. I've appended the full text of both to the end of this blog post.

Here are the results in chart form. (This is actually "Experiment 2" in the published version. Experiment 1 concerned hypothetical donation rather than actual donation, finding essentially the same results.) Error bars represent 95% confidence intervals. Click to enlarge and clarify.

Chris completed his dissertation in 2020 and went into the tech industry (a separate story and an unfortunate loss for academic philosophy!). But I found his paradigm and results so interesting that with his permission, I carried on research using his approach.

One fruit of this was a contest Fiery Cushman and I hosted on this blog in 2019-2020, aiming to find a philosophical argument that is effective in motivating research participants to donate to charity at rates higher than a control condition, since Chris and I had tried several which failed. We did in fact find some effective arguments this way. (The most effective one, and the contest winner, was written collaboratively by Matthew Lindauer and Peter Singer.) Fiery and I are currently running a follow-up study with more details.

The other fruit was a few follow-up studies I conducted collaboratively with Chris and Joshua May. In these studies, we added more narratives and more arguments -- including the winning arguments from the blog contest. These studies extended and replicated Chris's initial results. Across a series of five experiments, we found that participants exposed to emotionally engaging narratives consistently donated more and expressed more positive attitudes toward charitable giving than did participants exposed to the physics-text control condition. Philosophical arguments showed less consistent positive effects, on average considerably weaker and not always statistically detectable in our sample sizes of about 200-300 participants per condition.

For full details, see the full article!

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Narrative: Mamtha

Mamtha’s dreams were simple—the same sweet musings of any 10-year-old girl around the world. But her life was unlike many other girls her age: She had no friends and no time to draw. She was not allowed to attend school or even play. Mamtha was a slave. For two years, her every day was spent under the control of a harsh man who cared little for her family’s health or happiness. Mamtha’s father, Ramesh, had been farming his small plot of land in Tamil Nadu until a draught dried his crops and left him deeply in debt. Around that time, a broker from another state offered an advance to cover his debts in exchange for work on a farm several hours away.

Leaving their home village would mean uprooting the family and pulling Mamtha from school, but Ramesh had little choice. They needed the work to survive. Once the family moved, however, they learned that much of the arrangement was a lie: They were brought to a sand mine, not a farm, and the small advance soon ballooned with ever-growing interest they couldn’t possibly repay. This was bonded labor slavery.

Every day, Ramesh, his wife, and the other slaves rose before sunrise to begin working in the mine. For 16 hours a day, they hauled mud and filtered the sand in putrid sewage water. The conditions left them constantly sick and exhausted, but they were never allowed to take breaks or leave for medical care. When Ramesh tried to ask about their low wages, the owner scolded and beat him badly. When he begged for his family to be released, again he was beaten and abused. Ramesh knew the owner was wealthy and well-connected in the community, so escape was not an option. There was nothing he could do.

Mamtha’s family withered from malnutrition before her eyes in the sand mine. Every morning at 5 a.m., she watched with deep sadness as her parents left for another day of hard labor—and spent her day in fear this would soon become her fate. She was left to watch her baby sister, Anjali, and other younger children to keep them out of the way. Her carefree childhood was taken over byresponsibility, hard work and crushed dreams.

Everything changed for Mamtha’s family on December 20, 2013, when the international Justice Mission, a charitable aid organization funded largely by donations from everyday people, worked with a local government team on a rescue operation at the sand mine. Seven adults and five children were brought out of the facility, and government officials filed paperwork to totally shut down the illegal mine. After a lengthy police investigation, the owner will now face charges for deceiving and enslaving these families.

The next day, the government granted release certificates to all of the laborers. These certificates officially absolve the false debts, document the slaves’ freedom, and help provide protection from the owner. The International Justice Mission aftercare staff helped take the released families back to their home villages to begin their new lives in freedom.

For Mamtha, starting over in her home village meant making those daydreams come true: She was enrolled back in school and could once again have a normal childhood. She’s got big plans for her future—dreams that never would have been possible if rescue had not come. She says confidently, “Today, I still want to be a doctor. Now that I am back in school, I know I can achieve my dream.”

Singer-Style Argument:

1. A great deal of extreme poverty exists, which involves suffering and death from hunger, lack of shelter, and lack of medical care. Roughly a third of human deaths (some 50,000 daily) are due to poverty-related causes.

2. If you can prevent something bad from happening, without sacrificing anything nearly as important, you ought to do so and it is wrong not to do so.

3. By donating money to trustworthy and effective aid agencies that combat poverty, you can help prevent suffering and death from lack of food, shelter, and medical care, without sacrificing anything nearly as important.

4. Countries in the world are increasingly interdependent: you can improve the lives of people thousands of miles away with little effort.

5. Your geographical distance from poverty does not lessen your duty to help. Factors like distance and citizenship do not lessen your moral duty.

6. The fact that a great many people are in the same position as you with respect to poverty does not lessen your duty to help. Regardless of whether you are the only person who can help or whether there are millions of people who could help, this does not lessen your moral duty.

7. Therefore, you have a moral duty to donate money to trustworthy and effective aid agencies that combat poverty, and it is morally wrong not to do so.

For example, $20 spent in the United States could buy you a fancy restaurant meal or a concert ticket, or instead it could be donated to a trustworthy and effective aid agency that could use that money to reduce suffering due to extreme poverty. By donating $20 that you might otherwise spend on a fancy restaurant meal or a concert ticket, you could help prevent suffering due to poverty without sacrificing anything equally important. The amount of benefit you would receive from spending $20 in either of those ways is far less than the benefit that others would receive if that same amount of money were donated to a trustworthy and effective aid agency.

Although you cannot see the beneficiaries of your donation and they are not members of your community, it is still easy to help them, simply by donating money that you would otherwise spend on a luxury item. In this way, you could help to reduce the number of people in the world suffering from extreme poverty. You could help reduce suffering and death due to hunger, lack of shelter, lack of medical care, and other hardships and risks related to poverty.

With little effort, by donating to a trustworthy and effective aid agency, you can improve the lives of people suffering from extreme poverty. According to the argument above, even though the recipients may be thousands of miles away in a different country, you have a moral duty to help if you can do so without sacrificing anything of equal importance.