Who Is Better To Be The Thanker?

The donation behavior of individual was always a key problem in the research field of marketing and charity management. Previous studies overemphasized how to improve donator's help possibility and amount in the greatest degree through the stimulation of advertising information and ignore the research on the subsequent feeling and behavior tendency of donator after donation, which had no benefit for the stability and long term development of charity career. Our study focused on the form of acknowledge, according to thankfulness theory, motivation attribution theory and entitativity theory, analyzed the influence of thank-you letter's actor on donator's subsequent help willingness in private, explored the boundary condition of the main effect and provide the operational suggestion for the management and administration of charity career.Our research collected the data of experiment and found that the actor of the thank-you letter (victim, charity organization) indeed played an effect on donator's subsequent help desire. Based on attribution and entitativity theory, donator was more likely to attribute the motivation of the victim's thank action endogenously as the result of the interpersonal social principle, while on the condition of charity organization, because of its dynamical quality, donator's attribution would be influenced by the dynamical essences which indicated the group's behavior and action was for the sake of their common goal not merely meaning gratitude, elicited the exogenous attribution of the thank action. Because donator emerged different tendency on the attribution of acknowledge, they also obtained distinguish emotional support from the thank-you letter. If donator attributed the motivation of the acknowledge endogenously, they would also consider that the action could represent the positive emotion and subjective will of the actor which helped them feel the effectiveness and value of their effort, improved the self-efficacy and social worth and triggered more willingness to continue help behavior. If donator attributed the motivation exogenously which illustrated that the thank action couldn't mean actor's positive emotion and subjective will, it impeded donator to gain emotional support from the acknowledgement and then decreased the possibility of the help behavior in future.To expand the external validity and practical value of the main effect, our research employ new variable to analyze the boundary condition. The resulted revealed that the individual traits also could influence donator's attribution of the thank action, then affect the emotional support and subsequent help tendency. When individual had some obviously positive traits, for example, had a baby face or was a child, donator would easily consider the actor more sincere, which led the endogenous attribution to the thank action and higher possibility to continue help. When individual had some negative qualities, just like the patients in rehabilitation or ex-offenders, donator would be prone to suspect the thank action and attribute the motivation exogenously, which impeded donator to receive the emotional support from the thankfulness and decreased the subsequent willingness to help. Furthermore we also found the type of entitativity as the moderator. The dynamic type of entitativity elicited donator's the cognitive bias on group's motivation which led the exogenous attribution to group's thank action and a lower willingness to continue help. We changed the type of entitativity through constructing new appellation of charity organization in categorical manner (focusing on common traits) and expected that using categorical appellation of charity organization could decrease the negative effect and provide an opportunity for donator to consider the motivation of thank action in the way of interpersonal social manners as the result of the cognitive representation principle of categorical group-a sample of homologous exemplars (just as one person), which promoted the endogenous attribution for the motivation of thank-you letter, helped donator feel the emotional support in the thankfulness, increased their self-efficacy and social worth, and then finally made donator more likely to continue help.This paper consisted of four parts of introduction, literature review, experiments and conclusion. The introduction part included the Chapter1mainly clarifying the background and significance of this research as well as the research purpose and contains. Literature review was the Chapter2, mainly introduces the research scope and the shortage of the Chinese and foreign literature and research. Theory development was stated in Chapter3, in which we reviewed the donation behavior, thankfulness, attribution and entitativity theory. Chapter4to Chapter7was four studies. Chapter4constituted the first study, which analyzed and proved the relevance between the actor of thank-you letter and the donator's subsequent help willingness. Chapter5and6constituted the second study, which discussed the moderator role of individual trait and group quality in main effect. Chapter7constituted the third study, which explored the function of situation and clarified the boundary of main effect. Finally, in chapter8we concluded the results of experiment, the management and practice meaning. We also pointed out the limit in our research and made some suggestions to the future research.