ABSTRACT
People often pay little attention to the impact of their charitable donations. Recent research has attempted to promote more effective giving by providing information about donation effectiveness. However, how people judge effectiveness remains unclear. This study examined whether high-empathy conservation targets are perceived as more effective donation recipients. In two experiments, participants viewed advertisements for endangered species that varied in their empathic appeal. Study 1 (N = 200) revealed that empathy toward the target was linked to perceived donation effectiveness. Moreover, this empathy–effectiveness link persisted even when participants were encouraged to deliberate, as confirmed in Study 2 (N = 400). These findings suggest that people often base their judgments of effectiveness on how much empathy they feel toward the target, emphasizing the importance of interventions that foster empathy when promoting effective giving.