Unaccomplished Fundraising And Strengthened Benevolence:the Direction And Impact Of Counterfactual Thinking

Online fundraising is usually manifested as temporary donation,which means donors often donate and then never come back.As a result,online fundraising platforms are littered with a large number of fundraising projects that have been hastily closed without meeting their fundraising goals.Thus,it is still unknown whether the feedback methods actively used by fundraising platforms have the desired effect,or even the possible counter-effect.The influence of negative feedback has been concerned by many scholars,but no consistent conclusions have been drawn.Moreover,most of the research background is achievement-oriented,and few studies have focused on the influence and mechanism of negative feedback under non-achievement-oriented tasks.As fundraising platforms are full of unfinished projects,it’s important to study negative fundraising feedback.This study focuses on unfinished fundraising projects and explores the influence of negative feedback on donors’ re-donation intention and its internal mechanism through three experiments.First,study 1 examined the impact of negative feedback on redonation intention.Then,Study 2-3,the differential effect of negative feedback is analyzed by inducing counterfactual thinking in different directions and degrees.Specifically,study 2 analyzed the dynamic influence of different degrees of negative feedback on the direction of counterfactual thinking.Finally,study 3 verifies the influence of different counterfactual thinking directions on the intention to donate again.The main conclusions of this study are as follows :(1)negative feedback is conducive to the improvement of subsequent re-donation intention,and with the reduction of negative degree,re-donation intention first decreases and then increases.(2)When the negative degree is high,donors are more likely to produce downward counterfactual thinking,while when the negative degree is low,donors are more likely to produce upward counterfactual thinking.(3)Counterfactual thinking in different directions plays a positive role in promoting re-donation intention.This study enriches the research on the impact of negative feedback on re-donation intention and expands the application scope of counterfactual thinking and direction.This paper not only has theoretical contribution,but also provides theoretical basis and guidance for the feedback of fundraising platform.