Thinking about 1 versus 1,000

Every time I've cried while taking in news about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, my reaction was triggered by learning the story of a single person’s painful losses. Headlines about hundreds of deaths, war crimes and the millions of refugees who are suffering have prompted dismay and even curses, but they haven't produced tears. So this month, I’m sharing a Q&A that feels unfortunately timely. It explains why we react more emotionally to stories about a single victim than stories about thousands. While I’m on the topic, if you’ve been wondering how you can help the many victims in Ukraine, you may find this curated list of suggestions from Penn’s Center for High Impact Philanthropy helpful.

Before diving into this month’s Q&A, here are a few of my favorite (escapist) listens and reads of the last few weeks.

Recommended Listens and Reads

• Making the Best Use of Your Time: This wonderful New York Times op-ed does some depressing but useful math to help you re-prioritize the way you’re spending your hours.

• A Chat with Michael Lewis: In a particularly poignant episode of People I Mostly Admire, Steve Levitt interviews bestselling author Michael Lewis about his career, his latest book, and the tragic loss of his daughter.

• How to Kick Your Unhealthy Pandemic Habits: I recently chatted with NPR about how Americans could reboot from unhealthy pandemic habits, and this article shares several tips. 

• Overlooking Opportunities to Subtract: We’re back with a new season of Choiceology, and you won’t want to miss our opening episode; it’s about the human tendency to overlook opportunities to solve problems by subtracting instead of adding.

• Other Books like How to Change: I recently noticed that my publisher has created a collection of “other books like How to Change.” The list is so fantastic that I wanted to share it with you here:

Q&A: Scope Insensitivity and the Identifiable Victim Effect

In this Q&A from Choiceology, I talk with my Wharton colleague, psychologist and marketing Professor Deb Small. She explains the identifiable victim effect, scope insensitivity, and how they relate.

Me: Can you explain the identifiable victim effect?

Deb: The identifiable victim effect refers to this tendency for people to react empathically, compassionately, more strongly to a specific person in need as compared to statistical victims. You can think about the reaction to the latest kidnap victim who's portrayed on TV or a picture of a refugee that captures the media and society's attention and tends to attract a lot of aid, right? People tend to open not just their eyes, but their wallets when they learn about a specific person in need. And yet there are of course millions of people in need all the time, these more hidden victims around the world who we don't feel the same compassion toward.

Me: What's your favorite study demonstrating the identifiable victim effect?

Deb: Many years ago, we worked with the organization Save The Children. This was George Loewenstein, Paul Slovic, and I, and we created some marketing materials to see how best we could get people to donate money. One version simply showed a picture of a little girl. We said her name and her age and where she was from. Then we had another version in which we described several true statistics about the severity of need. Then we had a third version in which we both showed the picture and provided the statistics.

As you might expect, when we just showed the picture, we were able to get more people to donate than when we just showed the statistics. However, showing the picture and the statistics was not as effective as just showing the picture. 

Me: I love that study… it's fascinating. Why is it that adding the statistics to the image was less effective?

Deb: We go back to classic judgment in decision-making where people think in different ways. Kahneman uses the terms system one and system two. System one is more intuitive and more affective. System two is more reason-based and calculative. Statistics fit with system two, it’s numeric and quantitative, and it turns out that it’s just not motivating. So I think that when you present statistics to people, it changes their mindset in a way that they're less motivated to give. The other part of it could be that it shows the enormity of the problem and then makes that single individual presented in the picture seem less important. They're merely a drop in the bucket. So why bother? 

Me: Is there anything the average person should do or think about differently on a day-to-day basis?

Deb: There's kind of a dilemma here, right? On the one hand when you recognize the identifiable victim effect, it points out a distortion or bias. And it seems wrong to be devoting a lot of aid only when we're moved by one person. But at the same time, if we didn't have those feelings what's the alternative? Maybe people would be less generous overall.

And so one way I think about the identifiable victim effect is it's like a second best optimum. Our psychology, our feelings, our attention may not be leading to the most rational way of giving, but the absence of that psychology might make us cold and selfish. 

Me: There's another topic that's often discussed alongside the identifiable victim effect that I'd like to dig into. Could you describe what scope insensitivity is and how it differs from the identifiable victim effect?

Deb: Sure. Scope insensitivity comes from psychophysics, which is basically the relationship between the magnitude of a stimulus and the magnitude of response. And we know from lots of work in psychology and judgment and decision making that it's not a one-to-one mapping. As the magnitude of the stimulus increases, we tend to respond to it to a lesser and lesser degree.

Me: So one kind of stimulus would be like finding out how expensive something will be, and another would be finding out how many people will die from this policy. Is that right?

Deb: Yes. You can look at things like how bright a light seems or how loud a noise seems, but the same psychology carries over to how we feel about ourselves or our salary or income. So when we're in very low numbers, the differences seem relatively large, right? The difference between saving one and two lives feels pretty big to us. But when we're talking about the difference between 1,000,087 lives versus 1,000,088 lives, it doesn't feel very different. And sometimes the valuation curve flattens out pretty quickly. 

Interestingly the psychologist Chris Hsee has done some important work in which he finds that if you ask people how much they’d pay to save seven versus eight extinct birds, they evaluate saving eight birds as better than seven birds. But when they don't have the comparative—so you ask two groups of people separately about saving seven birds or saving eight birds—that's when they tend to look scope insensitive.

Me: Do you think it’s at all related to the identifiable victim effect?

Deb: Definitely related. The difference between zero and one is where you see the biggest gap. So that’s definitely one way to think about the identifiable victim effect. To me, the identifiable victim effect is more than that. It's also the things that happen when you focus on a specific individual, the humanity and the sense of moral obligation that is really specific to a single person in need.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

To learn more about the identifiable victim effect, listen to the episode of Choiceology where we dig into the topic.

That’s all for this month’s newsletter. See you in April.

Katy Milkman, PhD

Professor at Wharton, Host of Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab, and Bestselling Author of How to Change