Search Results (33)

Environmental awareness and sustainability are essential for city development. Therefore, the study examined the attitudes of 1023 Polish Generation Z students from WULS-SGGW in Warsaw, Poland, toward urban trees and willingness to support tree planting. The findings revealed that 75% care about the environment, 93% value nature, and 92% enjoy seeing new trees. Additionally, 74% support funding tree planting, 51% would volunteer, and 39% donate money. However, 54% believe that property owners should be free to cut trees. The Agglomerative Hierarchical Clustering (AHC) method was applied to divide students into clusters. Clusters differed first in students’ attitudes toward trees, from “Tree Lovers” to “Tree Sceptics”, and second in students’ anthropocentric vs. environmental orientation: opposing (“Trees First”) vs. supporting (“People First”) the right to freely cut private trees. An additional questionnaire allowed us to link students’ clusters with importance assigned to positive and adverse tree attributes, like “Attractiveness,” “Usefulness,” and “Danger”. The study results do not provide a clear answer regarding the issue of Polish Generation Z students and the future sustainable development of urban greenery. They want to support trees for practical qualities, beauty, and utility. However, many place an even greater value on their right to self-determination regarding their property, including tree removal. Full article

Background: Climate change and sustainability are highly interconnected. Addressing climate change requires major social change and collective action. The current study examined the prevalence of, and factors associated with, four climate change activism behaviors in a U.S. nationally representative sample. Methods: Data were derived from the Pew Research Center American Trends Panel conducted in April 2021 of 13,749 panelists. Key outcomes included (1) attending a protest or rally addressing climate change, (2) volunteering for a climate change activity, (3) donating money to an organization focused on climate change, and (4) contacting an elected official to urge them to address climate change. Multivariable logistic regression models examined the independent associations with psychosocial and demographic variables. Results: A fourth (24.7%) of participants reported engagement in one or more climate change activism behaviors. Of those who reported climate change activism, most (54.7%) only engaged in one activity. In the multivariable regression models, individual and social factors were significantly associated with all four climate action outcomes. Factors include social network communications and social norms variables, such as encouragement to take action, criticism for not taking action, and climate change communication frequency. Discussion: This study’s findings indicate that over 41 million U.S. adults reported having donated money to an organization focused on addressing climate change in the prior year, 25 million volunteered, and 26 million contacted an elected official. The association of social and communication variables with climate change activism suggests the importance of training people to talk about and encourage others to engage in climate change activism. Full article

This paper explores the adaptations Buddhism has made to digital payment methods in the context of the Chinese mainland. To provide the audience with a relatively comprehensive understanding of the general context in which the new method of donation is applied, this paper first introduces the development and digital landscape of the internet and third-party payments in the Chinese mainland. Then, statistical analysis is used to make large-scale claims by analyzing 1328 donation records made to Donglin Monastery in Mount Lu with the statistical software SPSS to determine whether the digital donation method is linked to the purpose of donations, or the amount of money being donated, and to what extent it substitutes for traditional donation methods. Full article

Does it matter whether charitable organizations address potential donors with an informal or formal second-person pronoun in their appeal to donate money? This study shows that it does indeed make a difference. Using an informal pronoun of address can have a positive effect on intentions to donate money. An online experiment (n = 220) found that a charitable appeal to potential donors was more effective when an informal rather than a formal second-person pronoun was used in Dutch, particularly for altruistic people. We discuss the potential explanations of this effect, concentrating on the association between the informal pronoun of address and perceived closeness, and the generic versus deictic reference of informal pronouns of address in Dutch. Full article

Blockchain technology contributes to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. Education for sustainable development (ESD) is UNESCO’s education sector response to the urgent and dramatic challenges the planet faces. The traditional way of donating money to charitable causes, such as education, has been through centralized methods and organizations that lack transparency, and donors often do not have a clear understanding of how their contributions are being utilized. Blockchain technology, particularly, platforms like Ethereum and Polygon, has the potential to address the issues associated with traditional donation systems. This paper proposes a decentralized web3 application that utilizes blockchain technology to enhance transparency and efficiency in educational donations in the context of sustainable development. The platform leverages decentralized protocols and smart contracts to ensure secure and transparent transactions, enabling donors to track the utilization of their contributions and ensuring their funds reach their intended beneficiaries. This paper discusses the design and implementation of the platform, highlighting its features and potential for transforming the landscape of charitable donations. This software application can be used in education, and a demo plus some scenarios/work cases are presented/analyzed. The main results and contributions open other future research directions for not only authors. Full article

Analysing and understanding donor behaviour in nonprofit organisations (NPOs) is challenging due to the lack of human and technical resources. Machine learning (ML) techniques can analyse and understand donor behaviour at a certain level; however, it remains to be seen how to build and design an artificial-intelligence-enabled decision-support system (AI-enabled DSS) to analyse donor behaviour. Thus, this paper proposes an AI-enabled DSS conceptual design to analyse donor behaviour in NPOs. A conceptual design is created following a design science research approach to evaluate an AI-enabled DSS’s initial DPs and features to analyse donor behaviour in NPOs. The evaluation process of the conceptual design applied formative assessment by conducting interviews with stakeholders from NPOs. The interviews were conducted using the Appreciative Inquiry framework to facilitate the process of interviews. The evaluation of the conceptual design results led to the recommendation for efficiency, effectiveness, flexibility, and usability in the requirements of the AI-enabled DSS. This research contributes to the design knowledge base of AI-enabled DSSs for analysing donor behaviour in NPOs. Future research will combine theoretical components to introduce a practical AI-enabled DSS for analysing donor behaviour in NPOs. This research is limited to such an analysis of donors who donate money or volunteer time for NPOs. Full article

The study utilizes the Chinese version of the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory (ZTPI-C) and a novelty intertemporal prosocial discounting paradigm to explore the preferences of individuals with the Present Impulsive Time Perspective (PITP) and the Future Time Perspective (FTP) in intertemporal prosocial choices, and uncovers the cognitive mechanisms underpinning intertemporal altruism from the personality traits. The findings revealed: (1) The donation behaviors of both groups decreased as time delay rose, aligning with the hyperbolic model. (2) PITP individuals had significantly higher discount rates than those with FTP, and the scores of FTP individuals on the “Future” dimension of the ZTPI-C were positively correlated with the amount of money they were willing to forgo. These results suggest that time perspective, as a stable personality trait, can predict individuals’ intertemporal prosocial preferences. Our research enriches the theory of intertemporal choices and extends the Perceived-time–based model (PTBM) to the domain of intertemporal social preferences. Full article

Based on the principle of “who protects and benefits will compensate”, in recent years, many Chinese herders have begun to voluntarily participate in sustainable grassland ecological compensation by donating money. However, this traditional strategy may have brought about “the tragedy of the commons”. A new strategy described as “wealthy herders pay money, ordinary herders participate in supervision, and relevant departments post a list of participants at the end of each month”, which was trialed in the Keshiketeng Banner, Inner Mongolia, China, attempts to solve “the tragedy of the commons”. This new strategy is neither “Leviathan” nor “Privatization”; it creates a third way for grassland herders to achieve spontaneous cooperation in protecting grassland ecology. This article presents a theoretical analysis framework and experimental simulation method using this new strategy. Considering the importance of face culture and gossip in herders’ social lives, this study used a public goods game (PGG) model to analyze and experimentally simulate the effect of this new strategy. The simulated data show the following: (1) Compared with the traditional strategy, this new strategy promotes cooperation more effectively. It requires less money, time and human capital from herders and can mobilize more herders to participate in sustainable grassland ecological compensation, leading to the emergence of a cooperation equilibrium among herders. (2) In this new strategy, the total contributions of herders are inversely proportional to herders’ “reputation tolerance”, and they are directly proportional to herders’ “income level”, “total budget” and “satisfaction and emotion”. The cooperation level is inversely proportional to “reputation tolerance” and “income level” and directly proportional to “total budget” and “satisfaction and emotion”. (3) The advantage of this new strategy is that it is robust to changes in the exogenous coefficient. Our research contributes to the application of the PGG model in the sustainable development of various resources and developing new approaches to mitigating “the tragedy of the commons”. Full article

The theory of licensing effect suggests that consumers tend to perform self-interested or self-indulgent actions after undertaking altruistic behaviors. How do past altruistic experiences affect the willingness of consumers to perform charitable behaviors in the future? Results from an exploratory approach comprising three laboratory studies and one field experiment demonstrate the existence of licensing effect in charitable conditions. We find that consumers are more unwilling to undertake charitable activities when they recall past similar experiences. The donation resources (time/money) do not influence the licensing effect. Two other variables moderate the size of the licensing effect: the way in which the initial charitable behavior is recalled (abstract vs. concrete) and the attribution for initial charitable behavior (collective vs. individual). We find that consumers are more reluctant to carry out charitable behavior when: (1) they recall the concrete details rather than the abstract goal of past activity; (2) consumers are praised for individual efforts rather than collective contribution in past activity. These findings offer new theoretical insights into the licensing effect in consumers’ charitable behaviors and set out practical implications for the sustainability of charitable programs. Full article

Knowledge of species is the basis for involvement in biodiversity awareness and protection. For the first time, we investigated how bird species knowledge is spread among adults in Germany in a representative study. It was shown that of the 15 species presented, only 6 were recognized on average, and 4.5% of the tested persons did not recognize any species at all. Only 0.5% knew all presented species. Younger participants in particular knew significantly fewer species than the group over 60 years. We also tested if species knowledge has an impact on the motivation to act for nature conservation. In this study, knowledge of species correlated directly with the willingness to take action for species protection, e.g., through donating money for proactive nature conservation. Simply being in nature was meaningless for the test result. However, if one was actively involved with birds, e.g., via bird counts or bird feeding, species knowledge was significantly better. Full article

Many universities around the world depend on financial donations to maintain and enhance their operations. We propose that donating money to an organization is a specific form of organizational citizenship behavior. We theorize that perceived values congruence between alumni and their colleges/universities and normative organizational commitment each provide motivation for people to donate money. We tested our hypotheses using alumni from a private college in the USA, measuring both the amount as well as the frequency of their donations to the college. We also measured alumni self-reports of values congruence and normative organizational commitment. We found empirical support for a positive relationship between values congruence and commitment and between commitment and financial giving. Values congruence, however, was not related to giving behavior; normative organizational commitment fully mediated the relationship between values congruence, and the alumnus’ financial giving behaviors. Higher education organizations that depend on donations from members to sustain their operations might focus advancement efforts on developing a perception of values congruence in potential donors, and/or by stimulating a sense of obligation to give back to the colleges from which they have previously derived benefits. Full article

Health self-tracking is an ongoing trend as software and hardware evolve, making the collection of personal data not only fun for users but also increasingly interesting for public health research. In a quantitative approach we studied German health self-trackers (N = 919) for differences in their data disclosure behavior by comparing data showing and sharing behavior among peers and their willingness to donate data to research. In addition, we examined user characteristics that may positively influence willingness to make the self-tracked data available to research and propose a framework for structuring research related to self-measurement. Results show that users’ willingness to disclose data as a “donation” more than doubled compared to their “sharing” behavior (willingness to donate = 4.5/10; sharing frequency = 2.09/10). Younger men (up to 34 years), who record their vital signs daily, are less concerned about privacy, regularly donate money, and share their data with third parties because they want to receive feedback, are most likely to donate data to research and are thus a promising target audience for health data donation appeals. The paper adds to qualitative accounts of self-tracking but also engages with discussions around data sharing and privacy. Full article

The stranger on the Internet effect has been studied in relation to self-disclosure. Nonetheless, quantitative evidence about how people mentally represent and perceive strangers online is still missing. Given the dynamic development of web technologies, quantifying how much strangers can be considered suitable for pro-social acts such as self-disclosure appears fundamental for a whole series of phenomena ranging from privacy protection to fake news spreading. Using a modified and online version of the Ultimatum Game (UG), we quantified the mental representation of the stranger on the Internet effect and tested if people modify their behaviors according to the interactors’ identifiability (i.e., reputation). A total of 444 adolescents took part in a 2 × 2 design experiment where reputation was set active or not for the two traditional UG tasks. We discovered that, when matched with strangers, people donate the same amount of money as if the other has a good reputation. Moreover, reputation significantly affected the donation size, the acceptance rate and the feedback decision making as well. Full article

We investigate whether revealing the identities in a public good game that includes a donation incentive leads to higher contributions to the public good. Previous evidence suggests that contributions to a public good increase significantly when these take place in public. Also, the amount of money given in charitable donations seems to be sensitive to the revealing of identities. Using a laboratory experiment, we implement a 20% donation share that is dependent on participants’ contributions to a public good. The donation is either costless (because it is financed by the experimenter) or deducted from a team’s contributions. In both settings, we explore whether informing participants that group members’ identities will be disclosed at the end of the experiment leads to higher contributions to the public good. Non-parametric statistics indicate that when donations are costly for the participants, the announcement of subsequent identity disclosure results in significantly higher contributions in the second half of the repeated public good game. In contrast, revealing identities in settings with costless donations reduces contributions to the public good significantly. The regression results indicate that conditional cooperators might be one subgroup driving these results. Full article

The current research examines the extent to which attitudes and personality traits are predictive of pro-environmental behavior (PEB). Concretely, we tested the relationship between pro-environmental attitudes, HEXACO personality traits, and actual PEB (donating potential prize money to a pro-environmental organization; N = 257). Additionally, we controlled for the influence of helping behavior (donating to a pro-social organization) by addressing whether attitudes and personality have a distinct impact on PEB or whether people are more likely to engage in PEB because they act more pro-socially in general. Analyses included correlations, multiple linear regressions, mediations, and partial correlations. Pro-environmental attitude had the most robust association with PEB and mediated the influence of openness to experiences and honesty–humility on PEB. Importantly, the relationship of pro-environmental attitudes and personality (openness to experiences and honesty–humility) with PEB was unaffected by the participant’s helping behavior, suggesting that pro-environmental people mainly care about the environment and are not necessarily more pro-social in general. Full article