Dual-Process Reasoning in Charitable Giving : Learning from Non-results

To identify dual process reasoning in giving, we exposed experimental participants making a charitable donation to vivid images of the charity's beneficiaries in order to stimulate affect. We hypothesized that the effect of an affective manipulation on giving is larger when we simultaneously put the subjects under cognitive load using a numerical recall task. Independent treatment checks cast doubt on the reliability of our mainstream treatment manipulations and reveal opposite responses in men and women. Only women responded to the manipulations as expected, but even among women we find no evidence for dual-process decision-making. These results highlight the need for caution in the use of these common manipulations, the importance of independent manipulation checks, and the limitations of dual-process models for understanding altruistic behavior