Charitable Giving: Antecedents and Mechanisms

Abstract

Charitable giving is important for modern society which refers to the voluntary donation to non-profit organizations that benefits others beyond one's own family. It is necessary to review the li-teratures of charitable giving as an independent theme, which may be helpful to the operation and development of relevant organizations. Researchers have extensively studied the antecedents of charitable giving from donors (demographic features, values, cognitive and emotional states), charities (organization characteristics and their interaction with donors) and social contexts (cultural features and social situations). However, further efforts are still needed on the development of integrated theory, exploration of its information processing and cross-cultural researches. Based on the review, we propose uncertainty to be an important factor which predicts that more uncertainty will lead to less charitable giving. Furthermore, different resources (giver, context and receiver) of uncertainty are discussed. At last, dual processing system is used to explain how uncertainty does work on charitable giving and that the connection of uncertainty and charitable giving will be stronger when analytic system works than intuitional system does.