Follow Your Heart or Follow the Crowd? Value Framing, Resonance, And Crowd Social Influence on Pledging Behaviour

The role of framing in mobilizing sustainable behaviour is a well-developed field that examines the means through which individuals/groups mobilize collective action by employing rhetorical devices in their communication. Critically for their success is the respective salience and resonance of the frame, where salience refers to the content of the message, while resonance refers to how that message is received by its audience. Our study seeks to examine how social influence – defined as an influence to accept information obtained from another as evidence about reality – influences the effect that framing has on individual decisions. Examining how consumers navigate under uncertainty and in particular whether consumers employ personal values or the actions of others in order to evaluate the merits of a given behaviour. To observe this, we employ a simulated crowdfunding experiment as it allows us to operationalise salient frames – in the form of value-framed project descriptions – measure resonance – the personal value orientation – and operationalise social influence through the level of funding that a given project has received. The project description and personal value orientation are drawn from de Groot & Steg’s (2008) work on egoistic, altruistic and biospheric values. Based on a stratified random sample of the US population (n=917) we find that respondents overwhelmingly drew on the social influence of others rather than personal values when making an investment decision, thus while frames can mobilize collective action, collectives by their nature also emit information about reality that influence individuals significantly.