Alviss

Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. High profile charity scandals have always represented a threat to the nonprofit sector, which relies on public trust and funding to operate. We systematically review 30 years of empirical research on scandals involving nonprofits and present both quantitative and qualitative syntheses of the 71 articles identified. Informed by this review, ...

The Australian bushfires in 2019–2020 triggered massive amounts of charitable giving from the community. We applied agenda‐setting theory to examine if and how disaster news coverage influenced public donations in response to the crisis. A survey of 949 Australians found that people perceived news coverage of the event to be a strong influence on the amount they donated to bushfire appeals, over a...

Journal of Cross Cultural Psychology, Ahead of Print. Although magical beliefs (such as belief in luck and precognition) are presumably universal, the extent to which such beliefs are embraced likely varies across cultures. We assessed the effect of culture on luck and precognition beliefs in two large scale multinational studies (Study 1: k = 16, N = 17,664; Study 2: k = 25, N = 4,024). Over and ...

Millions of charities compete for donations, yet no empirical study has examined patterns of shared giving behavior across the nonprofit sector. To understand which types of charities are more likely to share donors, we conducted a social network analysis using behavioral data from 1,504,848 donors to 52 large charities in Australia. Three hypotheses were tested, which considered how patterns of ...

World Psychiatry, Volume 21, Issue 2, Page 217 218, June 2022.

Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. There is a double standard in public responses to scandals: Nonprofits are penalized more harshly than commercial organizations for the same transgression (the “moral disillusionment effect”). However, previous research—focused on commercial organizations—has sometimes shown that a positive reputation can insure organizations against the ne...

Efforts to change the attitudes of creationists, antivaccination advocates, and climate skeptics by simply providing evidence have had limited success. Motivated reasoning helps make sense of this communication challenge: If people are motivated to hold a scientifically unorthodox belief, they selectively interpret evidence to reinforce their preferred position. In the current article, I summarize...