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 di...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of risk and uncertainty 1997-05, Vol.14 (3), p.235-257
Main Authors: JENNI, KAREN E., LOEWENSTEIN, GEORGE
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Automobiles
Children
Death
Economic value
Empathy
Highways
Killing
Normativity
Pesticides
Risk
Risk management
Uncertainty
Valuation
Victim identification
Victims
Citations: Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary: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.
ISSN:0895-5646
1573-0476
DOI:10.1023/A:1007740225484