Threat on Society or Health? How Different Framing of Covid-19 Affects People’s Willingness to Give Money and Time

As the coronavirus outbreak spreads, the pandemic has affected every region of the world, and its impacts are multi-fold; economic, political, and social. This research investigates how Covid-19 influences individuals’ prosocial intentions and behaviors through a random experiment and analysis of field data from a crowdfunding platform. When Covid-19 is described as a disease impacting society (vs. individual’s health), people perceive its threat more severely. We find that participants’ age moderates this relationship between Covid-19 descriptions and perceived severity. While perceived severity linearly increases with age in the health perspective condition, it does not vary by age in the social perspective condition. More importantly, this increased perception of Covid-19 severity subsequently leads to a higher willingness to help others with money (i.e., donation) but not with time (i.e., volunteering). We use a difference-indifference approach using large data from a loan-based crowdfunding platform, Kiva, and find that projects with society-related words yield higher funding success rates than those with health-related words after Covid-19. Our results suggest that highlighting the social aspect of Covid-19 rather than health-related issues would be a more effective communication strategy for encouraging prosocial behaviors.