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Category: Project

Description: Charitable behavior, for example, donating money to charitable organizations, can strengthen communities and foster equality. Despite the abundance of research on communication strategies that can boost charitable behavior, the interaction between different modalities in such strategies (e.g., written appeals and concurrently present sensory cues such as scent) is not yet well understood. By examining the impact of linguistic and sensory cues, this study tests whether the congruence between the linguistic cues and the scent enhances prosocial behavior more effectively than their individual effects. Participants (N = 161) were enrolled in a mixed‐design study with two factors: pronoun condition (between‐subjects: “you” vs. “we”) and odor condition (within‐subjects: own fragrance, other fragrance, “we‐fragrance,” odorless control). Specifically, participants were exposed to four counterbalanced odors while reading texts about charitable organizations that were manipulated for pronoun usage, after which they responded to measures of donation intention and attitudes toward the charity. After the charitable behavior part, participants rated odor pleasantness, familiarity, and intensity for each odor condition. The results showed no evidence for the preregistered interaction between pronoun use and odor condition. However, exploratory contrast analyses suggested that, compared to the odorless control condition, all odor conditions significantly enhanced immediate and future donation intention and attitudes toward the charity. Exploratory correlation analyses further suggested that perceived odor pleasantness, and not familiarity or intensity, may drive this effect, consistent with theories linking positive affect and trust to prosocial behavior. Future research should examine whether pleasant olfactory environments can reliably increase charitable behavior beyond linguistic framing strategies.