Standing out in a crowd of victim entrepreneurs: How entrepreneurs’ language-based cues of personality traits affect public support

Catastrophic events challenge the resilience of society and require entrepreneurs to act proactively. Government COVID-19 responses forced thousands of businesses to close, resulting in a staggering loss of revenue for small businesses. Many small business entrepreneurs turned to crowdfunding to make public funding appeals. Through the lens of the identifiable victim effect, we examine how donations to affected businesses are related to language-based cues of personality traits embedded in appeals. Using the IBM Watson Personality Insights algorithm, we assess charitable appeals for language-based cues that convey entrepreneurs’ Big Five personality traits. We test our model using 6,803 donation-based campaigns between March and May 2020. We further tested how crisis salience influenced prosocial behavior, discovering that donation effects were increased for appeals that highlighted the pandemic’s impact on the business. Our results suggest that language-based cues of personality traits have significant associations with public support when embedded in charitable appeals.