{"pk":49986,"title":"Increasing effective charitable giving with personalized LLM conversations","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Despite substantial charitable giving, donations often fail to maximize impact. While a variety of persuasive strategies can increase donations to effective charities, their success depends on individual differences. Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a powerful solution to this problem by dynamically personalizing persuasive strategies. In a pre-registered experiment (N=1952), we tested whether personalized LLM conversations could increase donations to the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF), rated one of the world's most effective charities. Participants allocated $1 between their favorite charity and AMF after being assigned to either: (1) a personalized persuasive LLM conversation, (2) a static LLM-generated persuasive message, and (3) a control conversation. Personalized LLM conversations significantly increased donations to AMF by 46.6%, outperforming the static message (28.7% increase). Personalized LLMs also shifted moral attitudes about charitable giving. Our findings highlight the potential of AI-driven personalization to enhance effective giving and provide new insights into the psychology of charitable persuasion.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Artificial Intelligence; Psychology; Behavioral Science; Decision making; Human-computer interaction; Social cognition; Computer-based experiment"}],"section":"Abstracts with Poster Presentation","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/36r0h3mv","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Joshua","middle_name":"P","last_name":"White","name_suffix":"","institution":"Massachusetts Institute of Technology","department":""},{"first_name":"Carter","middle_name":"","last_name":"Allen","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of California","department":""},{"first_name":"Lucius","middle_name":"","last_name":"Caviola","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Oxford","department":""},{"first_name":"Thomas","middle_name":"","last_name":"Costello","name_suffix":"","institution":"American University","department":""},{"first_name":"David","middle_name":"","last_name":"Rand","name_suffix":"","institution":"MIT","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2025-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/49986/galley/37948/download/"}]}