Does a good mood make for more generous donations?

NEW YORK — Those ads showing desperate animals while singer Sarah McLachlan’s “Angel” played in the background have not just been making viewers sad, but also successful at raising money for the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals since 2007.

However, a new study shows other strategies may also be effective at motivating people to give, apart from all that “sadvertising.” Maybe try “Hakuna Matata.”

The study from Nathan Chan, assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Casey Wichman, assistant professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, found that people in good moods are more likely to donate to a charitable cause.

The study gathered posts made to the X social media platform, from people who gave to Wikipedia and posted a hashtag acknowledging the donation. The researchers analyzed the posts from before and after the users made a donation and found it improved shortly before they gave.

“It suggests that rather than ... people (giving) because it makes them feel good about themselves ... , we found that people were in a good mood prior to donating, and that’s potentially the causal factor for why they decided to give,” Wichman said.

The findings indicate charities may want to improve a potential donor’s mood before making the ask, Wichman said.

Their study isn’t the first to find a connection between well-being and generosity, said Lara Aknin, professor of social psychology at Simon Fraser University, but it does provide a valuable look at a person’s specific feeling at a specific moment in a real world example.

But people give for many reasons and many levers motivate generosity, Aknin said, including showing how a potential donor can have a meaningful effect on causes they care about. She also warned that people are very attuned to ulterior motives attached to requests for help.