Helping a Victim or Helping the Victim: Altruism and Identifiability

By Deborah A. Small, George Loewenstein. 2003

860 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, General Decision Sciences, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7366512bbc8db05ef8da66fce02ea4b593c90384

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Citations in the corpus

“If I look at the mass I will never act”: Psychic numbing and genocide (2007, neutral): “People are much more willing to aid identiﬁed individuals than unidentiﬁed or statistical victims (Kogut & Ritov, 2005a; Schelling, 1968; Small & Loewenstein 2003, 2005; Jenni & Loewenstein, 1997).”
Aid in the Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina: Inferences of Secondary Emotions and Intergroup Helping (2007, background): “First, people are more generous toward personalized victims than they are toward aggregated victims (Small & Loewenstein, 2003).”
Giving from a distance: Putting the charitable organization at the center of the donation appeal (2013, background): “The identifiable victim effect occurs even with minimal information: In a study by Small and Loewenstein (2003), participants were more willing to donate when they believed their donations were designated for a predetermined specific anonymous victim (with no identification information) than when…”
Friends of Victims: Personal Experience and Prosocial Behavior (2008, background): “This effect is demonstrated even when no meaningful information is provided about the identified victim (Small and Loewenstein 2003).”
The Psychology of Charitable Donations to Disaster Victims and Beyond (2015, background): “Very subtle cues sometimes make big differences in terms of identifiability and helping behavior: Even just telling donors that a family which will benefit has been chosen, rather than that a family will be chosen, can increase donations (Small & Loewenstein, 2006).”
Vicarious Dishonesty: When Psychological Closeness Creates Distance from One's Moral Compass (2012, background): “Research on the ‘‘identifiable victim effect’’ has found that people tend to be far more concerned about and show more sympathy toward identifiable victims than statistical victims (Kogut & Ritov, 2005a; Loewenstein, Small, & Strnad, 2006; Small & Loewenstein, 2003).”
Event detail and confidence in gambling: The role of counterfactual thought reactions (2010, background): “The greater compassion and compensation offered to specific victims has been termed the ‘‘identifiable victim effect” by Small and Loewenstein (2003) .I n proposing a possible mechanism to account for the different reactions to general vs. specific events, Sherman et al. (1999) argued that the pro”
Nameless + harmless = blameless: When seemingly irrelevant factors influence judgment of (un)ethical behavior (2010, methodology): “Extending prior work in behavioral ethics and decision making, our research examines the effects of the identifiability of victims (Kogut & Ritov, 2005a, 2005b; Small & Loewenstein, 2003, 2005) and the effects of outcome information (Baron & Hershey, 1988) in ethical contexts.”
Pro-social behavior in a natural setting (2004, background): “…indicates the importance of identification with the ‘victim’ .12 Bolton et al. analyze how much context 12 The idea of the so-called ‘ identifiable victim effect’ goes back to Schelling (1968) and has recently been analyzed by Small and Loewenstein (2003). influences behavior in dictator games.”
Sympathy and callousness: The impact of deliberative thought on donations to identifiable and statistical victims. (2007, background): “ Small and Loewenstein (2003) and Kogut and Ritov (2005a) both found that the individuals gave more to help an identifiable victim than a statistical victim, even when controlling for the reference group.”
The Role of Empathy and Compassion in Conflict Resolution (2019, background): “The identifiable victim effect, for instance, denotes the observation that people tend to help single individuals in need more than they help multiple individuals in need (Jenni & Loewenstein, 1997; Lee & Feeley, 2016; Small & Loewenstein, 2003).”
Do fairness and race matter in generosity? Evidence from a nationally representative charity experiment (2011, methodology): “00 dictator game experiment where dictators sampled from the general public could donate money to Habitat for Humanity recipients, participants gave roughly 50% of the pie on average (Small and Loewenstein 2003).”