Notes on Vieites et al (2022) – Social Class Shapes Donation Allocation Preferences

Main Topic or Phenomenon

This paper examines how social class influences donation allocation preferences when consumers must choose between multiple charitable causes. Specifically, it investigates whether and why lower-class and higher-class consumers differ in their preferences for donating to “urgent” causes (addressing basic survival needs like food, shelter, safety) versus “non-urgent” causes (addressing development needs like cultural activities, sports).

Theoretical Construct

The central theoretical framework revolves around sympathy toward people’s unmet basic needs - defined as an emotional concern for others’ well-being specifically related to the fulfillment of basic survival needs. This sympathy is shaped by:

• Scarcity experiences: Chronic exposure to resource limitations that heighten awareness of and emotional response to others’ unmet basic needs
• Abundance experiences: Chronic exposure to resource plenty that reduces emotional sensitivity to others’ basic need deprivation

The theory proposes that social class creates systematically different experiences with scarcity/abundance, which in turn shapes intrinsic levels of sympathy toward basic need deprivation.

Key Findings

1. Main Effect (H1): Lower-class consumers donate significantly more to urgent causes (vs. non-urgent causes) compared to higher-class consumers, who actually show the reverse pattern - preferring non-urgent causes.

2. Sympathy Mechanism (H2): When sympathy toward unmet basic needs is enhanced through emotional displays, class differences in donation preferences are reduced, primarily due to increased donations to urgent causes among the wealthy.

3. Scarcity Moderation (H3): Class differences in donation preferences are attenuated when both social classes experience similarly high levels of scarcity for a particular need (e.g., safety in Rio de Janeiro), again primarily due to increased urgent cause donations among higher-class individuals.

4. Relative Generosity: Despite having fewer resources, lower-class participants donated substantially more as a percentage of their income, and even in absolute terms in some studies.

Boundary Conditions and Moderators

Emotional Display of Causes: Vivid, emotionally charged presentations of urgent needs (vs. neutral presentations) eliminate class differences by increasing sympathy among higher-class donors.

Type of Scarcity Experience: The effect is strongest when social classes have differential scarcity experiences (e.g., food, shelter) but weakens when both classes face similar high scarcity (e.g., safety concerns in high-crime areas).

Context Specificity: All studies were conducted in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil - a highly unequal socioeconomic environment. The generalizability to other cultural and economic contexts remains unclear.

Building on Previous Work

This paper extends existing literature in several ways:

• Beyond Amount to Allocation: While previous research focused on how much people give across social classes, this is among the first to examine what types of causes people prefer to support.

• Group-Based Sympathy: Extends individual-level sympathy research (Small & Simonsohn, 2008) to show how shared group experiences shape collective sympathetic responses.

• Scarcity Literature Extension: Builds on scarcity research (Shah et al., 2012) by showing how chronic scarcity experiences influence prosocial allocation decisions, not just personal decision-making.

• Challenges Generalizability Assumptions: Questions the common assumption that prosociality is a general, stable tendency that operates similarly across cause types.

Major Theoretical Contribution

The paper’s primary theoretical contribution is demonstrating that social class shapes specific prosocial preferences, not just prosocial magnitude. It introduces the concept of group-based sympathy formation through shared socioeconomic experiences and shows how chronic exposure to scarcity/abundance creates systematic differences in sensitivity to others’ basic needs. This challenges the view that generosity is a uniform trait and instead suggests it’s context-dependent based on the alignment between donors’ life experiences and recipients’ needs.

Major Managerial Implication

For charitable organizations and fundraisers targeting higher-class donors for urgent causes:

• Emotional Framing: Use vivid, emotionally charged presentations of urgent needs rather than neutral appeals
• Reframe Urgency: Connect urgent causes to issues that wealthy donors also experience (e.g., framing homelessness reduction as crime reduction)
• Strategic Segmentation: Recognize that wealthy donors may naturally gravitate toward non-urgent causes and require different persuasion strategies for urgent needs

The findings suggest that those with the most resources to give don’t spontaneously prioritize society’s most urgent needs, creating important implications for addressing social inequalities through philanthropy.

Unexplored Theoretical Factors

Several potential moderators and mechanisms were not examined:

• Identity-Based Motivations: How donor identity (religious, professional, cultural) might interact with social class in shaping cause preferences
• Temporal Orientation: Whether social class differences exist in preferences for short-term relief vs. long-term development causes
• Agency Beliefs: How beliefs about personal agency and systemic causes of poverty might moderate the relationships
• Social Signaling Motivations: The role of reputation management and peer approval in driving class-based giving patterns
• Geographic Distance: Whether proximity to beneficiaries moderates class-based sympathy differences
• Donation Mechanisms: How the method of giving (volunteering vs. money vs. goods) might interact with social class
• Cause Framing: Whether framing the same cause in different ways (promotion vs. prevention) creates different class-based responses

Reference

Vieites, Yan, Rafael Goldszmidt, and Eduardo B Andrade (2022), “Social Class Shapes Donation Allocation Preferences,” Journal of Consumer Research, 48 (5), 775–95.