Moral Framing and Charitable Donation: Integrating exploratory social media analyses and confirmatory experimentation

Do appeals to moral values promote charitable donation during natural disasters? Using Distributed Dictionary Representation, we analyze tweets posted during Hurricane Sandy to explore associations between moral values and charitable donation sentiment. We then derive hypotheses from the observed associations and test these hypotheses across a series of preregistered experiments that investigate the effects of moral framing on perceived donation motivation (Studies 2 & 3), hypothetical donation (Study 4), and real donation behavior (Study 5). Overall, we find consistent associations between moral care and loyalty framing with donation sentiment and donation motivation. Further, our results indicate that framing a donation solicitation with moral care leads to larger donations, compared to non-moral solicitations. Overall, this work demonstrates that theoretically constrained, exploratory social media analyses can be used to generate viable hypotheses. Further, we identify novel associations between specific moral frames and a range of constructs relevant to charitable donation.