How to make busy individuals donate more? The matching effect of charitable appeals and busyness on willingness to donate

Busyness is one of the most common states of the modern consumer. Previous studies have mainly distinguished busyness from the perspective of time pressure, but have not clearly categorized it. This study classifies busyness into two types: proactive busyness and forced busyness, based on the difference in the subject of work task assignment. This study proposes and tests a conceptual model based on the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) to reveal how to increase the willingness to donate of individuals with different types of busyness. Four studies were conducted in this research. The results showed that rational appeals increase the willingness to donate of proactively busy individuals by stimulating cognitive empathy. In contrast, emotional appeals increase the willingness to donate of forcedly busy individuals by activating affective empathy. This study also revealed that the potential boundary condition of this influence mechanism is the goal frame.