Neural Responses to Mandatory and Voluntary Donation Impact Charitable Giving Decisions: An Event-Related Potentials Study

Abstract

The present study aimed to explore the influence of donation amounts on donation decisions in different donation contexts and to reveal the psychological mechanisms. Furthermore, we focused on how to enhance individuals’ intention to donate voluntarily. We designed an experiment on donation decisions, employing event-related potentials (ERPs) to probe the effect of psychological mechanisms on donation decisions by detecting the neural basis of donation decision-making. Based on S-O-R (stimulus-organism-response) theory, we used donation contexts and donation amounts (stimuli) to induce psychological activity in the participants (organism) and then influence individual donation decision behaviors (response). Moreover, we applied psychological reactance (PR) theory to discuss the effect of donation context on decisions and the corresponding psychological process. The behavioral results showed that donation contexts (mandatory vs. voluntary) were significantly related to the donation amounts (i.e., less vs. more money that the charity received than money that the participants donated). At the ERP level, compared with mandatory donation, voluntary donation evoked a larger P2 amplitude when the charity received less money. In addition, a larger mean amplitude of LPP was elicited by voluntary donation compared to mandatory donation. This study provides practical implications for charity organizers to guide people to donate voluntarily.