Cues, Attention, and Charitable Giving

We identify cue-based beliefs as a source of context dependence in charitable giving. Adapting associative memory models to donations, we predict that cues shift giving by changing which beneficiaries and needs come to mind, even when the cues are uninformative about the donation decision. In online experiments, cues that draw attention to global needs increase giving to an international cause, whereas cues that draw attention to local needs reduce it. Open-ended text responses confirm the attentional mechanism. Applying the framework to fundraising design, we predict that neighborhood-based group appeals–which can raise giving when the charity's mission is local–may backfire when the charity's mission is global. In a natural field experiment with 105,000 donors to a charity with a global mission, such an appeal reduces pledge take-up by 33%. A complementary online experiment replicates this effect and shows that the appeal shifts attention toward local recipients and away from global ones. Heterogeneity reinforces this interpretation because, in both settings, the group appeal backfires most where baseline behavior suggests that global needs would otherwise have been more likely to come to mind. The results help organize evidence on media-driven shifts in giving, boomerang effects of norm nudges, failures of priming interventions to replicate, and the sensitivity of redistribution preferences to salient recipients.