In this episode of the Givers, Doers, & Thinkers podcast, Jeremy Beer sits down with Russell James to discuss the power and prominence of autobiographical thinking in donors.
Have you ever sat across from a major donor and thought, “I wish I could tell what was going on inside this person’s head right now?”
Turns out, some academic researchers have had the same thought—and the insights they are gleaning have important implications for on-the-ground fundraisers.
In a 2024 episode of the Givers, Doers, & Thinkers podcast, Dr. Russell James joins Jeremy Beer to discuss a study he conducted on donors using neuroimaging. James, a professor, chair, and program director at Texas Tech University’s School of Financial Planning, describes how he scanned the brains of donors who were actively engaged in estate planning. His experiment also asked them to make decisions about other kinds of charitable behavior, such as giving small gifts or volunteering, to try to determine when a donor was likely to say yes to an ask.
The scans showed activation in two regions of the brain as the donors made decisions about how to arrange their estates. The first was the precuneus, which, James explains, is involved “whenever we take an outside perspective on ourselves.” The second region is the lingual gyrus which lights up on scans when we visualize internally. When the regions activate at the same time, we are engaged in “visualized autobiography”—that is, we are time traveling, thinking back through past life events.
Why does this matter? What did James make of his findings? Well, James thinks that such neuroimaging studies become far more compelling when they are triangulated with other types of research, such as qualitative interviews with donors. In this case, the evidence that donors visualize a series of past life events while estate planning aligns strongly with the answers donors give when interviewed about their estate planning. They nearly always say that they choose to include specific charities in their planned giving because of connections to their life stories.
We might wonder, however, about the best way to 1) activate this sort of vivid autobiographical thinking and 2) encourage the donor to make autobiographical connections with the charity. Is a direct suggestion that the donor should review past life events while thinking about how their money will be directed after death too off-putting? What are the better and worse ways to navigate what can be a difficult topic?
James and podcast host Jeremy Beer emphasize in their conversation the need to bridge academic inquiry and questions practitioners have about their craft. And indeed, James, who spent many years working in development, has conducted a large-scale study that offers concrete guidance for the development officer who wants to put the neuroscience of charitable giving to good use. We don’t have to try out every version of asking about estate giving we can think of, because James and a team of researchers already did much of that work, testing out 26 different variations. What’s more, James says, they included nearly 10,000 donors.
In their tests, they found that people were significantly more interested in giving a gift when the specific phrase “to support causes that have been important in my life” was used in planned giving conversations or instruments. As Beer notes, it makes all sorts of sense that this phrase would be powerfully effective in activating autobiographical thinking. Once you hear it said aloud or see it on the page, it can seem as obvious as day. Yet, I’m willing to wager that many of us might fail to hit upon that particular way to speak about bequests through individual trial and error.
James skillfully fits together the practical and theoretical aspects of charitable giving, as well as identifying intersections among various types of academic research. The discussion piques interest in what else donor-centric neuroimaging might teach us, particularly in conjunction with studies using qualitative methods of inquiry.
For more fascinating insight into how donors connect their life stories to their charitable actions, check out this whole episode of this Givers, Doers, & Thinkers podcast here.
