Publications and Research
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
10-2019
Abstract
Charitable organizations often rely on pictures of victims to raise support for their causes. We examine the effect of donor perceptions of a novel aesthetic element of a victim’s physical appearance – his/her attire – on helping. In line with our theorizing, a field study, a survey and an experiment, together, show that donor perceptions that a victim is well attired reduces helping by diminishing her perceived need. Moreover, we show that this negative effect of neat attire on helping behavior is weaker for more physically attractive victims than for their less attractive counterparts. These findings establish a victim’s attire as a key driver of donor support, point to attire-based changes in need perceptions as the underlying mechanism, and underscore the interactive role of multiple aesthetic cues in the prosocial domain.
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Experimental Analysis of Behavior Commons, Marketing Commons, Nonprofit Administration and Management Commons, Social Psychology Commons
Comments
This article was originally published in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, available at https://doi.org/10.1086/705034 | This work is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0). | Recommended citation: Carvalho, S. W., Hildebrand, D., & Sen, S. (2019). Dressed to impress: The effect of victim attire on helping behavior. Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, 4(4), 376–386. https://doi.org/10.1086/705034