Charitable Donation Effort and Sacrifice

Abstract

The Charitable Donation Effort and Sacrifice (CDES) scale is a psychometric instrument designed to evaluate third-party observers’ perceptions of the investment, exertion, and personal loss incurred by an entity—either a corporation or an individual donor—when making a charitable contribution. Developed by Rachel Gershon and Cynthia Cryder (2018) within the context of consumer psychology and prosocial behavior research, the scale operationalizes the perceived personal and operational costs underlying philanthropic acts. Although the scale’s theoretical foundations initially distinguished between operational expenditure (effort, hard work, and thought) and foregone resources (perceived sacrifice and personal loss), empirical psychometric testing consistently demonstrates that these five items collapse into a robust, unidimensional construct. The instrument comprises 5 items rated on an authentic 7-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (“Not at all”) to 7 (“Very much / Extremely”). Across multiple experimental and field-adjacent samples, the CDES scale exhibits excellent internal consistency reliability, with Cronbach’s alpha coefficients typically exceeding .90, alongside strong convergent validity with measures of perceived donor warmth, perceived altruistic motivation, and consumer brand attitudes. By measuring how non-monetary and monetary costs signal authentic benevolence, the CDES scale provides researchers and practitioners in consumer psychology, organizational behavior, and social psychology with an empirically validated measure to determine how distinct charitable mechanisms—such as the donation of manufactured goods versus equivalent monetary funds—shape reputational credit and social judgments.

Keywords

Charitable Donation Effort and Sacrifice, CDES, prosocial behavior, corporate social responsibility, perceived effort, donor sacrifice, consumer perceptions, altruism signaling, warm-glow giving, psychometrics

Authors

The Charitable Donation Effort and Sacrifice instrument was conceived and validated by:

• Rachel Gershon, PhD — Assistant Professor of Marketing at the Rady School of Management, University of California, San Diego. Her research focuses on prosocial behavior, consumer choice, donor motivation, and social influence.
• Cynthia Cryder, PhD — Professor of Marketing at the Olin Business School, Washington University in St. Louis. Her scholarship examines judgment and decision-making, charitable giving, behavioral economics, and consumer financial well-being.

Original correspondence regarding the scale was directed to the authors through the Journal of Consumer Research editorial channels and their respective academic institutions.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Charitable Donation Effort and Sacrifice (CDES) scale is to quantify the subjective costs that observers attribute to a donor’s charitable action. In philanthropic and consumer decision-making settings, observers frequently evaluate not only how much was donated in objective monetary terms, but also how the donation was generated and delivered. Conventional economic models often assume that donations are valued strictly according to their objective financial magnitude; however, psychological and behavioral research demonstrates that social observers grant disproportionate moral and reputational credit to donors based on the perceived cognitive, physical, and personal costs required to execute the prosocial gesture.

The CDES scale was originally designed to investigate the psychological mechanisms through which different donation types (e.g., donating tangible goods vs. donating equivalent cash reserves) alter how much “charitable credit” observers assign to donors with low baseline warmth, such as for-profit corporations. Observers routinely suspect for-profit corporations of engaging in instrumental, self-serving, or performative philanthropy (commonly referred to as greenwashing or cause-exploitation). In response, Gershon and Cryder (2018) developed this instrument to test whether engaging in non-fungible, labor-intensive, or sacrificial contributions diminishes cynical attributions by elevating perceptions of tangible investment.

Beyond consumer psychology and marketing, the CDES scale serves diverse research applications across organizational behavior, public relations, and applied social psychology. Researchers deploy the tool to:

• Examine the boundary conditions under which corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives improve consumer brand equity, brand trust, and purchase intentions.
• Investigate how interpersonal peer-to-peer giving (e.g., volunteering time versus writing a check) influences social status, peer appreciation, and relationship closeness.
• Assess public trust in philanthropic institutions, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and high-net-worth philanthropists based on the perceived personal stakes involved in their giving.
• Differentiate between high-effort giving strategies and low-effort performative gestures (e.g., “slacktivism” or automated corporate payroll matchings).

Psychological Construct

The construct assessed by the CDES scale is Perceived Donation Effort and Sacrifice, defined as the degree to which an external observer perceives an actor (an individual, group, or corporate entity) to have devoted cognitive energy, labor, physical resources, and meaningful self-deprivation to accomplish a prosocial objective. Within the nomological network of moral psychology, this construct occupies a central position linking observable behavioral actions to internal inferences of authentic benevolence.

Effort and Hard Work

The effort component encompasses the perceived expenditure of energy, time, and physical or operational labor. In attribution research, effort is viewed as an internal, controllable factor (Weiner, 1985). When an entity expends substantial effort—such as manufacturing specialized goods, organizing complex logistical supply chains to distribute aid, or volunteering personal hours—observers infer intrinsic motivation. Unlike liquid capital, which can be disbursed via automated transactions with negligible cognitive or physical involvement, labor-intensive giving requires active, sustained focus, making it a salient indicator that the donor genuinely prioritizes the prosocial cause.

Thoughtfulness and Cognitive Investment

Item 3 of the scale measures perceived “thought” invested in the donation. Cognitive investment reflects the donor’s intentionality, problem-solving orientation, and tailored consideration of the recipient’s exact requirements. A thoughtful donation indicates that the donor paused to consider what beneficiaries truly need rather than offloading surplus capital or inventory indiscriminately. Observers associate high cognitive investment with empathy, perspective-taking, and affective care, directly enhancing the moral standing of the donor.

Sacrifice and Personal Loss

The sacrifice component relates to perceived costliness and self-deprivation—the extent to which the donation depleted assets, required painful trade-offs, or represented a tangible loss to the donor. While economically secure entities might disperse large sums of money with trivial impacts on their overall balance sheet, donating items or committing to actions that involve identifiable opportunity costs signals moral authenticity. Observers use perceived sacrifice to gauge whether an act was truly selfless or merely an effortless reallocation of peripheral surpluses.

Unidimensionality of the Construct

Although conceptual definitions frequently distinguish between effort (an active expenditure of kinetic or cognitive resources) and sacrifice (a passive or active surrender of valued assets), Gershon and Cryder (2018) discovered that observers do not naturally parse these components into orthogonal perceptual categories when evaluating charitable deeds. Instead, observers synthesize physical labor, careful consideration, and personal deprivation into a holistic evaluation of the donor’s “skin in the game.” Consequently, the psychological construct is best operationalized as a unified dimension of perceived costliness and personal commitment.

Theoretical Framework

The CDES scale is grounded in three foundational theoretical frameworks: Costly Signaling Theory, Attribution Theory, and the Stereotype Content Model of Social Perception.

1. Costly Signaling Theory

Costly Signaling Theory (originally posited in evolutionary biology by Zahavi, 1975, and extended to social and economic contexts by Spence, 1973) asserts that for a signal of underlying quality (e.g., altruism, reliability, or cooperation) to remain evolutionary stable and credible, it must be prohibitively costly or difficult to fake. In prosocial domains, easy-to-produce signals (such as small monetary pledges by ultra-wealthy entities) are frequently discounted as cheap talk. In contrast, investments requiring visible, non-recoverable outlays of effort, time, and sacrifice serve as reliable, hard-to-fake signals of genuine commitment. The CDES measures the observer’s appraisal of that signal’s costliness.

2. Attribution Theory and Discounting Principles

According to Harold Kelley’s (1973) discounting and augmentation principles, observers discount an actor’s internal motivation when salient external incentives exist (e.g., corporate tax write-offs, public relations gains, or brand enhancement). For-profit companies face chronic attribution discounting because their underlying mission is profit maximization. However, under the augmentation principle, when an actor undertakes a prosocial behavior in the presence of visible obstacles, inhibitory costs, or substantial personal sacrifices, observers infer that the actor’s internal altruistic motivation must be exceptionally potent. By measuring perceived effort and sacrifice, the CDES quantifies the psychological raw material that fuels causal augmentation.

3. The Stereotype Content Model

The Stereotype Content Model (Fiske, Cuddy, & Glick, 2007) posits that social perception is governed by two fundamental dimensions: warmth (perceptions of morality, trustworthiness, and friendliness) and competence (perceptions of skill, efficacy, and intelligence). For-profit corporations are routinely stereotyped as high in competence but inherently low in warmth. Gershon and Cryder (2018) showed that when low-warmth donors donate goods rather than cash, observers perceive significantly greater effort and sacrifice, which in turn directly repairs and elevates their perceived warmth. The CDES serves as the operational bridge explaining how tactical donation choices alter basic social-cognitive assessments of warmth.

Validity

The CDES scale demonstrates robust psychometric validity across multiple laboratory experiments and field-adjacent paradigms documented by Gershon and Cryder (2018).

Construct and Convergent Validity

Construct validity is substantiated by consistent, statistically significant correlations between the CDES and theoretically allied social-cognitive measures. In their empirical investigations, Gershon and Cryder demonstrated that the composite CDES score correlates strongly and positively with:

• Perceived Warmth: Higher effort and sacrifice evaluations correspond with marked increases on validated warmth scales (e.g., items measuring perceived benevolence, sincerity, and generosity; typical correlation range: $r = .55$ to $.70, p < .001$).
• Charitable Credit: Strong positive associations with observers’ willingness to award credit, praise, and moral elevation to the donor ($r > .60$).
• Authentic Altruistic Motivation: Inferences that the donor acted out of an intrinsic desire to help rather than cynical self-interest ($r = .50$ to $.65$).

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity was established by confirming that the CDES does not simply track overall positive affect, halo effects, or evaluations of donor competence. In structural modeling, perceived effort and sacrifice loaded separately from perceived donor competence (e.g., efficiency, business capability). Furthermore, the scale distinguishes between the absolute financial value of a gift and the subjective effort expended: when financial value was held strictly constant between conditions (e.g., $10,000 in cash vs.$10,000 worth of specialized manufactured goods), the CDES successfully registered dramatic differences in perceived effort and sacrifice, confirming that it measures procedural investment rather than monetary magnitude.

Predictive and Ecological Validity

The predictive utility of the CDES scale has been verified through downstream behavioral and attitudinal measures. In consumer choice contexts, elevated scores on the CDES scale directly mediated the effect of donation format on:

• Consumer brand attitudes ($eta$ typically ranging from $.30$ to $.45$).
• Purchase intentions and willingness to pay for the company’s retail products.
• Public word-of-mouth recommendations and brand defense against reputational crises.

Reliability

The CDES scale consistently exhibits high internal consistency reliability across varied experimental samples, including student cohorts, MTurk participants, Prolific panels, and representative consumer populations. In the initial development studies reported by Gershon and Cryder (2018), reliability metrics across several distinct empirical investigations yielded the following results:

• Study 1 (Corporate donor context): Cronbach’s $lpha = .91$, indicating high internal consistency among all five items.
• Study 2 (Goods vs. cash experimental manipulation): Cronbach’s $lpha = .93$.
• Study 3 (Boundary conditions and donor types): Cronbach’s $lpha = .90$.
• Study 4 (Individual vs. organizational donor replications): Cronbach’s $lpha = .94$.

Corrected item-total correlations for each of the five items routinely exceed $.70$, confirming that no single item introduces excessive error variance or diverges from the core construct. Test-retest reliability across brief experimental intervals demonstrates robust stability, and split-half reliability coefficients consistently exceed $.88$. The scale displays no problematic ceiling or floor effects when applied to standard philanthropic vignettes, maintaining adequate score variance across diverse experimental conditions.

Factor Analysis

Prior to empirical testing, the scale developers theorized that the instrument might possess a two-dimensional structure separating “operational effort” (Item 1: effort, Item 2: hard work, Item 3: thought) from “personal sacrifice” (Item 4: sacrifice, Item 5: personal sacrifice). However, extensive exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses disconfirmed this two-factor hypothesis in favor of a clean, parsimonious single-factor solution.

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

Principal component and maximum likelihood factor analyses conducted across multiple independent samples revealed:

• A single dominant factor accounting for over 75% to 82% of the total variance.
• Eigenvalues for the primary factor exceeding 3.80, while the second factor consistently failed the Kaiser criterion (eigenvalues < 0.50).
• Screen plots characterized by a severe “elbow” following the first factor, confirming unidimensionality.
• Factor loadings for all five items clustering tightly between $.80$ and $.94$, with no cross-loading ambiguities.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

Confirmatory factor analytic models evaluating the single-factor structure exhibit excellent fit indices across experimental investigations:

• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): $ge .98$
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): $ge .97$
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): $le .055$ (90% CI: [.031, .078])
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): $le .025$

Comparative structural modeling testing a two-factor model (effort vs. sacrifice) against the one-factor model found that the latent correlation between the two putative dimensions exceeded $r = .88$, indicating severe multicollinearity. Chi-square difference tests confirmed that specifying a second latent factor did not provide a statistically significant improvement in model fit, validating the author’s decision to treat all five items as indicators of a single latent factor.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

The CDES scale is a brief, self-administered survey tool designed for computer-based, paper-and-pencil, or experimental lab administration. Its operational specifications are summarized below:

• Instrument Name: Charitable Donation Effort and Sacrifice (CDES) Scale
• Original Authors: Rachel Gershon and Cynthia Cryder (2018)
• Administration Format: Standardized self-report questionnaire
• Target Respondent: Third-party observers (consumers, community members, experimental participants) evaluating a donor entity
• Target Entity Adaptability: The brackets in the original items allow researchers to substitute [the company], [the donor], [the organization], or specific proper nouns (e.g., “Target”, “John”) depending on the experimental scenario
• Item Count: 5 items
• Authentic Response Scale: 7-point Likert scale (1 = Not at all, 7 = Very much / Extremely)
• Scoring Protocol: All 5 items are scored in a direct, positive direction (no reverse-scored items). Researchers calculate a single composite perceived effort and sacrifice score by taking the unweighted arithmetic mean across all five completed items:

Composite Score = (Item 1 + Item 2 + Item 3 + Item 4 + Item 5) / 5

• Score Interpretation: Scores range from 1.00 to 7.00. Higher values denote greater perceived personal commitment, logistical exertion, cognitive planning, and substantial resource sacrifice invested into the charitable act.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Charitable Donation Effort and Sacrifice (CDES) scale was published in 2018 in the Journal of Consumer Research. The instrument is accessible for scholarly, academic, and non-commercial educational research purposes under standard fair-use principles, provided appropriate academic citation is given to the original authors and publication venue. Commercial applications, standardized testing redistribution, or integration into proprietary market research platforms may require formal copyright clearance from the copyright holder (Oxford University Press / Journal of Consumer Research, Inc.).

References

• Berman, J. Z., Levine, E. E., Barasch, A., & Small, D. A. (2015). The braggart’s dilemma: On the social rewards and penalties of advertising one’s good deeds. Journal of Marketing Research, 52(1), 90–104. https://doi.org/10.1509/jmr.14.0002
• Fiske, S. T., Cuddy, A. J., & Glick, P. (2007). Universal dimensions of social cognition: Faces and traits, warmth and competence. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11(2), 77–83. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2006.11.005
• Gershon, R., & Cryder, C. (2018). Goods donations increase charitable credit for low-warmth donors. Journal of Consumer Research, 45(2), 451–469. https://doi.org/10.1093/jcr/ucy004
• Kelley, H. H. (1973). The processes of causal attribution. American Psychologist, 28(2), 107–128. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0034225
• Lin-Healy, F., & Small, D. A. (2012). Cheapened altruism: Discounting of prosocial behavior when fuel is added to the fire. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 117(2), 269–274. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2011.11.006
• Lin-Healy, F., & Small, D. A. (2013). Nice guys finish last and vs. in conflict: The role of self-interest in altruistic attribution. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 49(6), 1104–1109. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2013.07.011
• Spence, M. (1973). Job market signaling. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 87(3), 355–374. https://doi.org/10.2307/1882010
• Weiner, B. (1985). An attributional theory of achievement motivation and emotion. Psychological Review, 92(4), 548–573. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.92.4.548
• Zahavi, A. (1975). Mate selection—A selection for a handicap. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 53(1), 205–214. https://doi.org/10.1016/0022-5193(75)90111-3

Items of the Scale