Donor happiness comes from afar: The role of donation beneficiary social distance and benevolence

Gopal Das, Patrick van Esch, Shailendra Pratap Jain and Cui, Yuanyuan (Gina)

International Journal of Research in Marketing, 2023, vol. 40, issue 4, 865-880

Abstract: Although donors may prefer contributing to causes that help those who are socially closer to them, we propose that donating to socially distant beneficiaries makes donors feel happier. This occurs because donating to distant (vs. close) others results in an experience of greater benevolence. We further identify regulatory focus as a boundary condition of these effects. In one choice study and four experiments featuring close to 2,500 respondents, we demonstrate this phenomenon across diverse samples and varying forms of beneficiaries. Our research extends prior work examining the impact of recognition from others on charitable behavior to examine donors’ self-evaluations, and how they impact happiness.

Keywords: Beneficiary distance; Benevolence; Donating; Happiness; Regulatory focus (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167811623000514
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ijrema:v:40:y:2023:i:4:p:865-880

DOI: 10.1016/j.ijresmar.2023.08.005

Access Statistics for this article

International Journal of Research in Marketing is currently edited by Roland Rust

More articles in International Journal of Research in Marketing from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().