Explaining the Identifiable Victim Effect

It is widely believed that people are willing to expend greater resources to save the lives of identified victims than to save equal numbers of unidentified or statistical victims. There are many possible causes of this disparity which have not been enumerated previously or tested empirically. We discuss four possible causes of the identifiable victim effect and present the results of two studies which indicate that the most important cause of the disparity in treatment of identifiable and statistical lives is that, for identifiable victims, a high proportion of those at risk can be saved.

[1]  P. Slovic,et al.  FACTS AND FEARS: UNDERSTANDING PERCEIVED RISK.: P/3 , 1980 .

[2]  Irving Piliavin,et al.  GOOD SAMARITANISM: AN UNDERGROUND PHENOMENON?1 , 1969 .

[3]  Ralph L. Keeney,et al.  Understanding Life-Threatening Risks , 1995 .

[4]  M. Douglas.  Risk and Blame: Essays in Cultural Theory , 1994 .

[5]  L. Ross,et al.  Human Inference: Strategies and Shortcomings of Social Judgment. , 1981 .

[6]  W. Kip Viscusi,et al.  Utility Functions That Depend on Health Status: Estimates and Economic Implications , 1990 .

[7]  Robert D. Bullard,et al.  Confronting environmental racism : voices from the grassroots , 1994 .

[8]  J K Horowitz,et al.  Baseline risk and preference for reductions in risk-to-life. , 1993, Risk analysis : an official publication of the Society for Risk Analysis.

[9]  K. Shrader-Frechette.  Risk and Rationality: Philosophical Foundations for Populist Reforms , 1991 .

[10]  W. Viscusi.  Fatal Tradeoffs: Public and Private Responsibilities for Risk , 1992 .

[11]  R. C. Schwing,et al.  Societal Risk Assessment: How Safe is Safe Enough? , 1980 .

[12]  Elizabeth Telfer,et al.  Causing Death and Saving Lives , 1978 .

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

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

[15]  John T. Sanders.  Risk and value , 1996 .

[16]  B. Latané,et al.  The Unresponsive Bystander: Why Doesn't He Help? , 1972 .

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

[18]  Shelley E. Taylor,et al.  Stalking the elusive "vividness" effect. , 1982 .

[19]  R. Keeney,et al.  Improving risk communication. , 1986, Risk analysis : an official publication of the Society for Risk Analysis.

[20]  A. Tversky,et al.  The framing of decisions and the psychology of choice. , 1981, Science.

[21]  Steve Rayner,et al.  Cultural theory and risk analysis , 1992 .

[22]  A. L. Beaman,et al.  Empathy-based helping: is it selflessly or selfishly motivated? , 1987, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[23]  G. Gellert,et al.  Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit , 1994 .

[24]  The ultimate choice. , 1993, Time.

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

[26]  J. Rodin,et al.  Good samaritanism: an underground phenomenon? , 1969, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[27]  Joseph S. Pliskin,et al.  The Economic Value of Changing Mortality Probabilities: A Decision-Theoretic Approach , 1980 .

[28]  J. Jaffray,et al.  Experimental comparison of individual behavior under risk and under uncertainty for gains and for losses , 1987 .