| The purpose of my dissertation is to understand prosocial (or helping) behavior when responding to a charitable appeal. I am interested in enhancing the persuasiveness of charity appeal by considering a moderating effect of an underexplored but critical variable: a valence of charity appeal (positive features vs. negative features) with other various effects or factors uncovered. This research, despite its significance, has been underexplored in marketing.;Recent research shows that the physical warmth induced by contact with a warm object (e.g., holding a cup of hot coffee) evokes attitudes and behaviors linked to interpersonal warmth, including prosocial behavior. However, using grounded cognition literature, in the first essay, I reason that physically warm stimuli might not necessarily be required to induce perception of physical warmth, because non-haptic stimuli, such as certain colors and images of warm objects, might do the same. In five studies, I investigate the effects of various types of non-haptic stimuli on messages from charities seeking to promote prosocial behaviors. Findings of these studies indicate that non-haptic stimuli indeed can bolster the persuasiveness of charitable appeals with some contingencies.;In the second essay, I investigate how singularity or identification effects are moderated by a charity appeal-type (positive vs. negative). While most previous studies found that a single victim is more persuasive than a group of victims (singularity effect) and that an identified victim is more appealing than a non-identified victim (identification effect), the dissertation examines how those effects are moderated by the type of charity appeal because people's information processing depends on an appeal-type. I find that singularity or identification effects are line with the previous research for a negative appeal, in which empathy serves as a mediator. However, I find that the effects disappear, and even the results differ for a positive charity appeal, when positive emotions serve as a mediator. |
