Why people believe it
Being moved feels like information. A strong feeling seems to signal an urgent need, and a personal connection, such as an illness in the family or a disaster on the news, gives a real reason to care and to keep caring.
What’s true
Feeling moved matters. It is often what gets people to give at all, and the decision researcher Paul Slovic argues that feelings are needed to motivate lifesaving action. A personal tie to a cause can bring knowledge, commitment and staying power. Many moral traditions also hold that we owe more to the people close to us, a question Charitology leaves open in its Disagreement Register.
What’s misleading
The strength of a feeling tracks how vivid a need is, not how large or how neglected. Research by Slovic and others shows the pattern. People gave more to help one named girl than in response to statistics about many people in need, and adding the statistics to her story lowered giving. A single sick child drew more money than a group of eight. Slovic calls this “psychic numbing”: concern does not grow with the number of people suffering, and it can shrink.
Disaster giving shows the same pull. In a Pew survey of people who gave to Haiti by text message in 2010, 89 percent had heard about the appeal on television, and half gave the moment they heard. Causes that move many people at once, like the Ice Bucket Challenge, can raise enormous sums in a single summer.
That last point cuts against the myth. When a cause moves everyone, money pours in, and the next dollar may do less there than in a cause few people have heard of. This is the idea of neglectedness: how much a problem already receives, compared with how big it is.
What to ask instead
How large is the need, how much money is already going to it, and what would one more gift change? Then give with your heart and your head together. See the identifiable victim effect, psychic numbing and the Story Bias.