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Being Alone Deserves More Sympathy? Influences of Victim Number, Cause Acuteness and Individual
Differences in Self-Construal on Charitable Advertising Effectiveness

we find no such differences between the two types self-construal when the story is of an
ongoing tragedy, regardless of victim numbers. In other words, whether the story depicts
a single victim or a group of victims, we find no obvious differences between the reaction
of the interdependents and the independents. We also find that guilt is the underlying

mechanism that explains the three-way interaction effect among victim numbers, cause
acuteness and self-construal.
The current research contributes to the evolving research stream on the “identifiable

victim effect” by examining cause acuteness and consumer differences in self-construal
as boundary conditions. Previous research has focused on the advantageous impacts of
the “identifiable victim effect” and argued that people tend to feel greater empathy and
an urge to help in situations where the tragedy involves a specific, identifiable individual,
compared to situations where the victims are a group of people. On the other hand, this

research considers the effective cue of cause acuteness and the priming effect of self-con-
strual, and suggests that the presentation of a group of victims in a sudden disaster can be
more persuasive than that of a single identifiable victim when the consumers (donors) are

interdependent self-construal. Conversely, charitable giving ads regarding sudden disasters
work for the independents only when the ads are about a single, identifiable victim.
This research also provides new insights into how to promote a charitable issue by
framing the beneficiaries as a single victim or a group of victims, and the psychological
significance of how the victims and the issue are presented. Our findings provide guidance

as to the appropriate framing of the charitable communication in order to promote public
endorsement, enhance advertising persuasion, and to increase donations. Marketers are
likely to be better able to tease out the optimal variant among all the possible ad design op-

tions when they know how to achieve an effective match among victim number framing,
cause acuteness, and consumer self-construal.

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