Can anthropographics promote prosociality? a review and large-sample study

Abstract

Visualizations designed to make readers compassionate with the persons whose data is represented have been called anthropographics and are commonly employed by practitioners. Empirical studies have recently examined whether anthropographics indeed promote empathy, compassion, or the likelihood of prosocial behavior, but fndings have been inconclusive so far. This work contributes a detailed overview of past experiments, and two new experiments that use large samples and a combination of design strategies to maximize the possibility of fnding an efect. We tested an informationrich anthropographic against a simple bar chart, asking participants to allocate hypothetical money in a crowdsourcing study.We found that the anthropographic had, at best, a small efect on money allocation. Such a small efect may be relevant for large-scale donation campaigns, but the large sample sizes required to observe an efect and the noise involved in measuring it make it very difcult to study in more depth. Data and code are available at https://osf.io/xqae2/.