Advanced Search
MyIDEAS: Login

Explaining the "Identifiable Victim Effect."

Contents:

Author Info

  • Jenni, Karen E
  • Loewenstein, George

Abstract

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. Copyright 1997 by Kluwer Academic Publishers

Download Info

If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view it first. In case of further problems read the IDEAS help page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
File URL: http://journals.kluweronline.com/issn/0895-5646/contents
File Function: link to full text
Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.

Bibliographic Info

Article provided by Springer in its journal Journal of Risk and Uncertainty.

Volume (Year): 14 (1997)
Issue (Month): 3 (May-June)
Pages: 235-57

as in new window
Handle: RePEc:kap:jrisku:v:14:y:1997:i:3:p:235-57

Contact details of provider:
Web page: http://www.springerlink.com/link.asp?id=100299

Related research

Keywords:

References

No references listed on IDEAS
You can help add them by filling out this form.

Citations

Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
as in new window

Cited by:
  1. Friedrich, James & Lucas, Gale & Hodell, Emily, 2005. "Proportional reasoning, framing effects, and affirmative action: Is six of one really half a dozen of another in university admissions?," Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Elsevier, vol. 98(2), pages 195-215, November.
  2. Georges Dionne & Paul Lanoie, 2002. "How to Make a Public Choice About the Value of a Statistical Life: The Case of Road Safety," Cahiers de recherche 02-04, HEC Montréal, Institut d'économie appliquée.
  3. Tehila Kogut & Ruth Beyth-Marom, 2008. "Who helps more? How self-other discrepancies influence decisions in helping situations," Judgment and Decision Making, Society for Judgment and Decision Making, vol. 3(8), pages 595-606, December.
  4. Bartels, Daniel M., 2006. "Proportion dominance: The generality and variability of favoring relative savings over absolute savings," Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Elsevier, vol. 100(1), pages 76-95, May.
  5. Georges Dionne & Paul Lanoie, 2004. "Public Choice about the Value of a Statistical Life for Cost-Benefit Analyses: The Case of Road Safety," Journal of Transport Economics and Policy, London School of Economics and University of Bath, vol. 38(2), pages 247-274, May.
  6. Winslott Hiselius, Lena, 2003. "The Value of Road and Railway Safety - an Overview," Working Papers 2003:13, Lund University, Department of Economics.
  7. Hammitt, James K. & Treich, Nicolas, 2007. "Statistical vs. Identified Lives in Benefit-Cost Analysis," Open Access publications from University of Toulouse 1 Capitole http://neeo.univ-tlse1.fr, University of Toulouse 1 Capitole.
  8. Kogut, Tehila & Ritov, Ilana, 2005. "The singularity effect of identified victims in separate and joint evaluations," Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Elsevier, vol. 97(2), pages 106-116, July.
  9. Stephan Dickert & Paul Slovic, 2009. "Attentional mechanisms in the generation of sympathy," Judgment and Decision Making, Society for Judgment and Decision Making, vol. 4(4), pages 297-306, June.
  10. Werner Güth & M. Vittoria Levati & Matteo Ploner, 2011. "Let Me See You! A Video Experiment on the Social Dimension of Risk Preferences," Czech Economic Review, Charles University Prague, Faculty of Social Sciences, Institute of Economic Studies, vol. 5(2), pages 211-225, August.
  11. Bruno S. Frey & Iris Bohnet, 1999. "Social Distance and Other-Regarding Behavior in Dictator Games: Comment," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 89(1), pages 335-339, March.
  12. Small, Deborah A. & Loewenstein, George & Slovic, Paul, 2007. "Sympathy and callousness: The impact of deliberative thought on donations to identifiable and statistical victims," Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Elsevier, vol. 102(2), pages 143-153, March.
  13. Paul Dolan & Jan Abel Olsen & Paul Menzel & Jeff Richardson, 2003. "An inquiry into the different perspectives that can be used when eliciting preferences in health," Health Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 12(7), pages 545-551.
  14. F. Feri & C. Giannetti & N. Jentzsch, 2013. "Disclosure of Personal Information under Risk of Privacy Shocks," Working Papers wp875, Dipartimento Scienze Economiche, Universita' di Bologna.
  15. Slovic, Paul & Finucane, Melissa L. & Peters, Ellen & MacGregor, Donald G., 2007. "The affect heuristic," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 177(3), pages 1333-1352, March.
  16. Huber, Michaela & Van Boven, Leaf & McGraw, A. Peter & Johnson-Graham, Laura, 2011. "Whom to help? Immediacy bias in judgments and decisions about humanitarian aid," Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Elsevier, vol. 115(2), pages 283-293, July.
  17. Jennifer Amsterlaw & Brian Zikmund-Fisher & Angela Fagerlin & Peter A. Ubel, 2006. "Can avoidance of complications lead to biased healthcare decisions?," Judgment and Decision Making, Society for Judgment and Decision Making, vol. 1, pages 64-75, July.
  18. Small, Deborah A., 2010. "Reference-dependent sympathy," Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Elsevier, vol. 112(2), pages 151-160, July.
  19. Ritov, Ilana & Kogut, Tehila, 2011. "Ally or adversary: The effect of identifiability in inter-group conflict situations," Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Elsevier, vol. 116(1), pages 96-103, September.

Lists

This item is not listed on Wikipedia, on a reading list or among the top items on IDEAS.

Statistics

Access and download statistics

Corrections

When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:kap:jrisku:v:14:y:1997:i:3:p:235-57

For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Guenther Eichhorn) or (Christopher F. Baum).

If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

If references are entirely missing, you can add them using this form.

If the full references list an item that is present in RePEc, but the system did not link to it, you can help with this form.

If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.