Emotional Pathways to Engagement with Global Poverty An Experimental Analysis
Political efforts to engage the public in global poverty and foreign aid appear ever more important. But there is cause to believe that efforts to secure charitable donations are actually undercutting political support for development assistance. Appeals made by international development NGOs have long made use of shocking, negative imagery and language to appeal to the public's emotions of pity and guilt to elicit donations. While traditional appeals are known to generate revenue for NGOs by way of donations, there are growing concerns that they negatively affect other forms of engagement with international development, and reduce support for development in the long term. Despite emotions being central to this debate, there is little empirical evidence on whether different types of appeals can trigger different emotional responses, and whether the emotional responses produced by different appeals impact different forms of public engagement with global development. In this paper, we address this gap using a survey experiment (N= 701) where respondents are randomly assigned to one of three treatments. We find that the 'traditional' and 'alternative' appeals trigger positive and negative emotional responses and that emotional responses mediate respondents' likelihood of making a donation and individual efficacy in addressing problems of global poverty.