Charity or Investment: Linguistic Features of Identifiable Victim Effect in Microlending

With the widespread adoption of crowdfunding, new questions arise concerning how individuals make funding decisions online where the role of texts as well as pictures and videos become particularly important. Our study used the text from Kiva which enables prosocial lending to small business and community groups located in emerging markets. Given that funders do exhibit prosocial motivation, we draw on the identifiable victim effect theory which postulates identifiability of a victim leads to greater charitable giving. We then develop nuanced linguistic features to operationalize the identifiable victim effect and test if operationalization has an impact on funding. Our work found that some of the hypotheses related to vividness and certainty are supported. This study has a potential to make a significant contribution to the growing body of prosocial lending studies by enriching the literature using identifiable victim effect theory and operationalizing nuanced linguistic features