Would donors rather help 1 or 100? You might be surprised.

It's always great to see Wired Magazine contain some content that hits home for online fundraising. "Count on Geeks to Rescue the Earth" in the September 2007 issue looks at the psychology of numbers and how it affects our ability to make giving decisions.

The bottom line, our brains might just be wired to help an individual and not group. Research is showing that an individual is morel likely to be responsive and help that one child on tv walking barefoot through a shantytown and living in squalor than they are to helping a group of children living in the same conditions.

Apparently a brain can grasp how one child lives, but show a group of children and the  empathy drops off quickly.

The article is based on research done by Paul Slovic, a psychologist at Decision Research. The article mentions a recent experiment that showed a picture of one starving child in Mali and asking people if they'd be willing to help the child. A different group was shown a picture of two starving children. The group seeing 2 children would give 15% less than those shown just 1 starving child. Another experiment asked whether you would donate to help 1 dying child vs. a picture of 8 children dying from the same cause. The group shown the picture of 8 would give 50% less.

This is a great case for testing disaster relief appeals -- would pushing help for a single example of tragedy do better than asking for donations to support the masses? Or as Slovic uses in another presentation, there is this quote from Mother Teresa that says it all:

"If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at one, I will."

Comments

[Olga Woltman]

Jen, this is super! A good reminder to focus on the story, the face not the statistics behind the cause.