Supporting conservation: the roles of flagship species and identifiable victims

We experimentally investigated how (i) identifiable versus statistical beneficiaries and (ii) flagship versus non-flagship species affected donations to a conservation charity. All data were collected in March 2016 using the online labour market, Amazon Mechanical Turk. All respondents were US-based, approval rate > 75%, no of HITS completed > 0. All subjects were paid a show-up fee of $0.40 and presented with information about the effects of climate change on various species. They were then given a $0.50 endowment and the opportunity to donate as much or as little of this endowment as they wished to WWF, a charity working to mitigate the effects of climate change on each species. Subjects were also required to answer five questions to measure attitudes towards climate change (two questions), the sense of responsibility felt towards other species (two questions); and the extent to which individuals would be willing to modify their behaviour to reduce negative climate impacts (one question).Respondent data and R code for analysis is available.