Interactions between donor Agreeableness and recipient characteristics in predicting charitable donation and positive social evaluation

Department of Psychology, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, United States
Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO, United States
DOI
10.7287/peerj.preprints.1182v1
Subject Areas
Psychiatry and Psychology
Keywords
personality, charity, Agreeableness, social evaluation, charitable donation
Copyright
© 2015 Yarkoni et al.
Licence
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ PrePrints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
Cite this article
Yarkoni T, Ashar YK, Wager TD. 2015. Interactions between donor Agreeableness and recipient characteristics in predicting charitable donation and positive social evaluation. PeerJ PrePrints 3:e1182v1

Abstract

Agreeable people are more likely to display prosocial attitudes and helpful behavior in a broad range of situations. Here we show that this tendency interacts with the personal characteristics of interaction partners. In an online study (n = 284), participants were given the opportunity to report attitudes toward and make monetary donations to needy individuals who were described in dynamically generated biographies. Using a machine learning and multilevel modeling framework, we tested three potential explanations for the facilitatory influence of Agreeableness on charitable behavior. We find that Agreeableness preferentially increased donations and prosocial attitudes toward targets normatively rated as being more deserving, but not to targets considered less deserving. Our results advance understanding of person-by-situation interactions in the context of charitable behavior and prosocial attitudes.

Author Comment

This is a revised version of a submission to PeerJ for review.

Supplemental Information

Supplementary Tables and Figures

DOI: 10.7287/peerj.preprints.1182v1/supp-1