Abstract
People's preference to help single victims about whom they have some information is known as the identifiable victim effect. Previous research suggests that this effect stems from an intensive emotional reaction toward specific victims. The findings of two studies consistently show that the identifiability effect is attenuated when the subject is in a positive mood. Study 1 (along with a pilot study) demonstrate causal relationships between mood and identifiability, while using different manipulations to induce moods. In both studies, donations to identified victims exceeded donations to unidentified people-in the Negative Mood manipulations-while participants in the Positive Mood conditions showed no such preference. In Study 2, individual differences in people's moods interacted with the recipient's identifiability in predicting donations, demonstrating that the identifiability effect is attenuated by a positive mood. In addition, emotional reactions toward the victims replicate the donation pattern, suggesting emotions as a possible explanation for the observed donation pattern.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | e0252278 |
| Pages (from-to) | e0252278 |
| Journal | PLoS ONE |
| Volume | 16 |
| Issue number | 6 June |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jun 2021 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2021 Sabato, Kogut. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.