Poverty Porn and Perceptions of Agency: An Experimental Assessment
| Published date | 01 May 2024 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14789299231152437 |
| Author | Emily Clough,Jill Hardacre,Elizabeth Muggleton |
| Date | 01 May 2024 |
https://doi.org/10.1177/14789299231152437
Political Studies Review
2024, Vol. 22(2) 347 –364
© The Author(s) 2023
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/14789299231152437
journals.sagepub.com/home/psrev
Poverty Porn and Perceptions
of Agency: An Experimental
Assessment
Emily Clough, Jill Hardacre
and Elizabeth Muggleton
Abstract
For decades, scholars, non-governmental organisations and observers have expressed concern
about the use of sensationalised images of people in the developing world in non-governmental
organisation fundraising advertisements. They fear that these negative messages, often known as
‘poverty porn’, lead to a perception of people in developing countries as helpless and lacking in
agency. Despite this ongoing concern, there has been no empirical assessment of the effect of
exposure to these negative messages on the perceptions of people living in poverty in developing
countries. Our research employs an online experiment of 450 UK respondents to address this
gap. It examines how watching charity advertisements affects people’s perceptions of the agency
of those in poverty in developing countries. We find that those who viewed negative portrayals
of those in poverty were more likely to rate people in poverty lower on measures of agency. This
empirically validates the criticisms of these types of negative advertisements.
Keywords
experiments, development aid, paternalism
Accepted: 5 January 2023
Introduction
The purposefully shocking use of images of people in poverty in the developing world,
particularly sick and starving children, has been the subject of controversy since the early
1980s, when Lissner (1981) famously compared such images with pornography due to
their intimate, personal nature. In the ensuing 40 years, the use of such images has been
critiqued by post-colonial scholars (Bleiker and Kay, 2007; Hutchison, 2014; Lidchi,
1999) as well as being subject to ongoing critiques in the media (Editorial Board, 2021).
These images can have powerful impacts on how those in the developing world are
Politics Department, School of Geography, Politics and Sociology, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon
Tyne, UK
Corresponding author:
Emily Clough, Newcastle University, Henry Daysh Building, Newcastle upon Tyne NE17RU, UK.
Email: Emily.clough@ncl.ac.uk
1152437PSW0010.1177/14789299231152437Political Studies ReviewClough et al.
research-article2023
Article
348Political Studies Review 22(2)
viewed by those in the developed world, leading to paternalistic attitudes and a possible
‘white saviour’ understanding of these countries. ‘Recognition of the importance of the
negative effects these ads can have led to the General Assembly of European NGOs
adopting in 2007 a code of conduct that called on all international development NGOs
and journalists to refrain from using ‘pathetic images’ that stereotype and sensationalise
in their depiction of developing countries (CONCORD, 2012). This asserted that all
future communications by international development NGOs must be based on the core
values of human dignity, respect and truthfulness (CONCORD, 2012).
However, the use of negative imagery has persisted,1 and continues to be the subject
of debate in the sector, exemplified by the ‘Rusty Radiator’ awards for poor practice in
this area (SAIH, 2017). The continued use of these images is no doubt driven in part by
the widespread belief that they increase fundraising for these worthy causes. This belief
has been supported by considerable empirical evidence from scholars in communications
and fundraising which shows that these kinds of images increase financial giving in
response to fundraising calls (e.g. Breeze and Dean, 2012; Das et al., 2008) or support for
foreign aid (Bayram and Holmes, 2021). Given the considerable financial pressure on
non-governmental organisations (NGOs), it is understandable that they would continue to
make use of advertising techniques that make use of these images.
While the positive financial impacts have been repeatedly experimentally tested and
affirmed, the claim that these negative images lead to paternalistic attitudes towards those
in developing countries has been widely asserted but with almost no experimental evi-
dence. This tension between the empirically tested positive results of these images for
fundraising and the asserted negative impacts of these images on paternalistic attitudes
towards those in the developing world makes it important to strengthen the empirical
evidence for their negative effects. We know from experimental studies of attitudes
towards people in poverty in developed countries that these attitudes can be strong
affected by the way their images are presented and framed (e.g. Blair et al., 2014;
Cozzarelli et al., 2001; Hall et al., 2014; Iyengar, 1990; Noone et al., 2012; Richey Smith
et al., 2016). The only study of the impacts of negative imagery on paternalistic views
towards those in the developing world is Baker (2015); in this article, he explores the
effects of race on paternalistic attitudes towards those in developing countries, but takes
as given that these types of advertisements lead to paternalistic attitudes towards those in
the developing world in general.
We address this significant gap by conducting an online experiment of 450 people in
the UK, using the platform Prolific Academic. We use a 3-factorial experimental design
to look at the impact of two television adverts from Save the Children, one using positive
and one negative messaging, versus a control condition in which the ad is not shown.
We examine whether this affects paternalistic attitudes, specifically the extent to which
those in developing countries are perceived as lacking in agency. We find that the adver-
tising which uses negative messaging has a statistically significant effect on the respond-
ents’ perceptions of the agency of those in the developing world. This is especially
remarkable given the relatively short period of the experimental stimulus.
The article starts by describing what we mean by positive and negative messages in
international development NGO adverts. It then discusses the literature around percep-
tions of agency, our main dependent variable, across a range of disciplines and articu-
lates our hypotheses. The subsequent sections discuss the experiment we ran and the
analyses we performed on our results. Finally, we discuss our results and the implica-
tions for the aid sector.
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