The singularity effect of identified victims in separate and joint evaluations

Abstract People’s greater willingness to help identified victims, relative to non-identified ones, was examined by eliciting real contributions to targets varying in singularity (a single individual vs. a group of several individuals), and the availability of individually identifying information (the main difference being the inclusion of a picture in the “identified” versions). Results of the first and second experiments support the proposal that for identified victims, contributions for a single victim exceed contributions for a group when these are judged separately, but preference reverses when one has to choose between contributing to the single individual and contributing to the group. In a third experiment, ratings of emotional response were elicited in addition to willingness to contribute judgments. Results suggest that the greater contribution to a single victim relative to the group stems from intensified emotions evoked by a single identified victim rather than from emotions evoked by identified victims in general.

[1]  Jerry A. Hausman,et al.  Contingent valuation : a critical assessment , 1993 .

[2]  J. Baron.  Biases in the quantitative measurement of values for public decisions , 1997 .

[3]  M. Dekay,et al.  Further Explorations of Medical Decisions for Individuals and for Groups , 2000, Medical decision making : an international journal of the Society for Medical Decision Making.

[4]  George Loewenstein,et al.  Helping a Victim or Helping the Victim: Altruism and Identifiability , 2003 .

[5]  Ilana Ritov,et al.  Economic Preferences or Attitude Expressions?: An Analysis of Dollar Responses to Public Issues , 1999 .

[6]  P. Slovic,et al.  The affect heuristic , 2007, European Journal of Operational Research.

[7]  Jonathan Baron,et al.  Behavioral Law and Economics: Reluctance to Vaccinate: Omission Bias and Ambiguity , 1990 .

[8]  C. Daniel Batson,et al.  Prosocial Motivation: Is it ever Truly Altruistic? , 1987 .

[9]  D. Kahneman,et al.  Heuristics and Biases: The Psychology of Intuitive Judgment , 2002 .

[10]  Kevin L. Harrell,et al.  Empathic joy and the empathy-altruism hypothesis. , 1991, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[11]  Richard P. Larrick,et al.  Goals as Reference Points , 1999, Cognitive Psychology.

[12]  David M. Messick,et al.  Environment, ethics, and behavior : the psychology of environmental valuation and degradation , 1998 .

[13]  Baron,et al.  Protected Values and Omission Bias. , 1999, Organizational behavior and human decision processes.

[14]  R. S. Rosomoff,et al.  The life you save may be your own. , 1996, The Clinical journal of pain.

[15]  G. Loewenstein,et al.  Explaining the Identifiable Victim Effect , 1997 .

[16]  Kevin J. Boyle,et al.  Measuring Natural Resource Damages with Contingent Valuation: Tests of Validity and Reliability , 1993 .

[17]  Ilana Ritov,et al.  Determinants of stated willingness to pay for public goods: A study in the headline method , 1994, Journal of risk and uncertainty.

[18]  D. Hamilton,et al.  Perceiving individuals and groups: expectancies, dispositional inferences, and causal attributions. , 1999, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[19]  D. Asch,et al.  Are medical treatments for individuals and groups like single-play and multiple-play gambles? , 2006, Judgment and Decision Making.

[20]  Paul Slovic,et al.  Preference reversals and the measurement of environmental values , 1993 .

[21]  Nathan Novemsky,et al.  How are base-rates used, when they are used: a comparison of additive and Bayesian models of base-rate use , 1999 .

[22]  Christopher K. Hsee,et al.  The Evaluability Hypothesis: An Explanation for Preference Reversals between Joint and Separate Evaluations of Alternatives , 1996 .

[23]  I. Simonson,et al.  Attribute–Task Compatibility as a Determinant of Consumer Preference Reversals: , 1997 .

[24]  Holly A. Schroth,et al.  The Inconsistent Role of Comparison Others and Procedural Justice in Reactions to Hypothetical Job Descriptions: Implications for Job Acceptance Decisions , 1994 .

[25]  Don A. Moore,et al.  Explaining how preferences change across joint versus separate evaluation , 1999 .

[26]  Jeffrey W. Sherman,et al.  Perceiving individuals and groups: Expectancies, dispositional inferences, and causal attributions - eScholarship , 1999 .

[27]  David A. Lishner,et al.  Altruism and helping behavior , 2003 .

[28]  D. Hamilton,et al.  Perceiving persons and groups. , 1996, Psychological review.

[29]  Baruch Fischhoff,et al.  Scope (in)sensitivity in elicited valuations , 1998 .

[30]  D A Redelmeier,et al.  Discrepancy between medical decisions for individual patients and for groups. , 1990, The New England journal of medicine.

[31]  Ilana Ritov,et al.  The ''Identified Victim'' Effect: An Identified Group, or Just a Single Individual? , 2005 .

[32]  Christopher K. Hsee,et al.  Music, Pandas, and Muggers: On the Affective Psychology of Value , 2004, Journal of experimental psychology. General.

[33]  Gary H. McClelland,et al.  Probability and utility of endangered species preservation programs , 1996 .

[34]  L. L. Shaw,et al.  Immorality from empathy-induced altruism: when compassion and justice conflict , 1995 .

[35]  Jonathan Baron,et al.  Determinants of insensitivity to quantity in valuation of public goods: Contribution, warm glow, budget constraints, availability, and prominence , 1996 .