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Empathy leads to increased online charitable behaviour when time is the currency
Author(s) -
Farrelly Daniel,
Bennett Michael
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
journal of community and applied social psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.042
H-Index - 63
eISSN - 1099-1298
pISSN - 1052-9284
DOI - 10.1002/casp.2339
Subject(s) - empathy , altruism (biology) , anger , psychology , social psychology , affect (linguistics) , currency , task (project management) , sympathy , economics , monetary economics , management , communication
This study shows how the empathy–altruism hypothesis can affect helping behaviour where time spent is the currency, through the novel use of a real world charity. Using an online charity task ( www.freerice.com ), we show that inducing empathy and also anger cause participants to spend more time donating rice to the United Nations World Food Programme. These findings therefore support the empathy–altruism hypothesis and add to previous research that have mainly used artificial and/or hypothetical scenarios by further showing that its effects can be applied to real world scenarios where helping behaviours are beneficial.