E-Mail The decision to donate to a charity is often driven by emotion rather than by calculated assessments based on how to make the biggest impact. In a review article published on April 29 in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences, researchers look at what they call "the psychology of (in)effective altruism" and how people can be encouraged to direct their charitable contributions in ways that allow them to get more bang for the buck--and help them to have a larger influence. "In the past, most behavioral science research that's looked at charitable giving has focused on quantity and how people might be motivated to give more money to charity, or to give at all," says first author Lucius Caviola (@LuciusCaviola), a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. "Our paper focuses on the effectiveness of giving--how people decide which charity to give to and ways that people can be motivated to give to charities that are more effective."