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Sympathy and Callousness: The Impact of Deliberative Thought on Donations to Identifiable And Statistical Victims
Abstract
When donating to charitable causes, people do not value lives consistently. Money is often concentrated on a single victim even though more people would be helped, if resources were dispersed or spent protecting future victims. We examine the impact of deliberating about donation decisions on generosity. In a series of field experiments, we show that teaching or priming people to recognize the discrepancy in giving toward identifiable and statistical victims has perverse effects: individuals give less to identifiable victims but do not increase giving to statistical victims, resulting in an overall reduction in caring and giving. Thus, it appears that, when thinking deliberatively, people discount sympathy towards identifiable victims but fail to generate sympathy toward statistical victims.
... Prior studies on altruism have revealed that providing information about an anonymous victim or statistical victim (regardless of its magnitude) is not nearly as powerful in eliciting prosocial affect and behavior as a vivid story about a single, identifiable victim (Jenni & Loewenstein, 1997;Small et al., 2007;Small & Loewenstein, 2003). This phenomenon, known as the identifiable victim effect, suggests that even a very weak form of identifiability (e.g., pre-selecting a specific recipient for a prosocial act without providing any personal information about them) is sufficient to increase caring and donations (Small & Loewenstein, 2003). ...
... In all experiments, we hypothesized that participants would be more likely to show prosocial intention and behavior toward the single-identifiable animal victim compared to the other animal victim conditions. Further, as previously mentioned, emotional processes elicited in response to a single-identifiable victim were determined to be a crucial factor in this effect (Kogut & Ritov, 2005a, 2005bSmall et al., 2007;Västfjäll et al., 2014). In light of that, in Experiments 1 and 2, following the assessment of the dependent measure, we asked participants to rate their feelings of sympathy toward the runaway calf/calves and distress in response to the story. ...
... In contrast, in the current work, we found that the average donation (as well as other prosocial acts) to a single-identifiable victim was higher than the average donation to a group of victims (regardless of the identifiability of the group). Thus, consistent with previous findings on a single-identifiable human victim (Kogut & Ritov, 2005a, 2005bSmall et al., 2007;Västfjäll et al., 2014), in the current work, we found not only insensitivity to the number of farm animal victims, but also a greater willingness to help a single-identifiable animal compared to the willingness to assist a group of animals. ...
Diets based on animal products are costly to our health and the planet and often inflict suffering on animals.
In this study, we aimed to elicit animal advocacy among omnivores using the identifiable victim effect, a well-documented phenomenon in which presenting an identifiable victim, compared to anonymous or statistical victims, evokes greater caring and helping behavior.
We explored whether this finding extends to farm animal victims and particularly among omnivores who may have a material interest in the outcome (i.e., the slaughter of farm animals).
Consequently, due to their dietary lifestyle and consumer support of the meat industry, they may be perceived as complicit in the victimization.
In Experiment 1, omnivore participants indicated a greater likelihood to sign and share a petition to save an identified runaway calf (presented with a name and a picture) from slaughter than several unidentified runaway calves.
In Experiment 2, we extended these findings to actual petition signing, along with reporting support of the petition.
In Experiment 3, we further replicated the identifiability effect using real donations to save the runaway calf (calves) from slaughter and demonstrated it is limited to a single-identified victim.
Additionally, we found that feelings of sympathy (Experiment 1) and ambivalence towards meat (Experiment 3) mediated the effect, whereas concern, empathy, identification with animals (Experiment 2), and ecological identity (Experiment 3) moderated it.
Omnivores who scored high in concern and ecological identity, and low in empathy and identification with animals were more susceptible to the effect.
Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.
... Humans are intuitively prosocial and altruistic (Batson & Shaw, 1991;Zaki & Mitchell, 2013). Yet they are often unmoved by widespread problems, a fact that has perplexed psychologists for decades (Slovic, 2010;Slovic et al., 2007;Small et al., 2007). Why don't mass atrocities, famines, and genocides motivate more action? ...
... How can we be so callous? One of the bestdocumented explanations of this apathy is that it is a limitation of the human heart (Hsee & Rottenstreich, 2004;Slovic, 2010;Slovic et al., 2007;Small et al., 2007). Here, we offer a complementary answer. ...
Across 15 studies (N = 2,636), people who considered the prevalence of a problem (e.g., 4.2 million people drive drunk each month) inferred it caused less harm, a phenomenon we dub the big problem paradox. People believed dire problems—ranging from poverty to drunk driving—were less problematic upon learning the number of people they affect (Studies 1–2). Prevalence information caused medical experts to infer medication nonadherence was less dangerous, just as it led women to underestimate their true risk of contracting cancer. The big problem paradox results from an optimistic view of the world. When people believe the world is good, they assume widespread problems have been addressed and, thus, cause less harm (Studies 3–4). The big problem paradox has key implications for motivation and helping behavior (Studies 5–6). Learning the prevalence of medical conditions (i.e., chest pain, suicidal ideation) led people to think a symptomatic individual was less sick and, as a result, to help less—in violation of clinical guidelines. The finding that scale warps judgments and de-motivates action is of particular relevance in the globalized 21st century.
... Found moderate evidence of publication bias, adjusting for which, there was no evidence for the identified victim effect, with adjusted effect down to r = .002 Maier et al. (2023) replication of Small et al. (2007) Identifiability + Singularity A failed replication of Small et al. (2007). No support for identified victim effects Moche and Västfjäll (2021) Identifiability In 3 studies (overall N = 1508) with different samples from different countries, there was no main effect of identifiability on any of the measures Moche et al. (2022) Singularity Weak effects, with just below the alpha threshold for the Israeli sample, and in the Swedish sample, a signal for willingness to contribute was detected but not for actual donations Moche et al. (2023) Singularity Three adults elicited more help than one adult Moche et al. (2024) Identifiability Identified victim effect is contextual and much weaker than originally thought Morvinski and Gordon-Hecker (2023) Singularity Adding a photo has a positive effect on donations, yet results are inconsistent with singularity effect and scope insensitivity Vu et al. (2024) Identifiability No effect of identifiability on altruism on willingness to contribute. ...
... Found moderate evidence of publication bias, adjusting for which, there was no evidence for the identified victim effect, with adjusted effect down to r = .002 Maier et al. (2023) replication of Small et al. (2007) Identifiability + Singularity A failed replication of Small et al. (2007). No support for identified victim effects Moche and Västfjäll (2021) Identifiability In 3 studies (overall N = 1508) with different samples from different countries, there was no main effect of identifiability on any of the measures Moche et al. (2022) Singularity Weak effects, with just below the alpha threshold for the Israeli sample, and in the Swedish sample, a signal for willingness to contribute was detected but not for actual donations Moche et al. (2023) Singularity Three adults elicited more help than one adult Moche et al. (2024) Identifiability Identified victim effect is contextual and much weaker than originally thought Morvinski and Gordon-Hecker (2023) Singularity Adding a photo has a positive effect on donations, yet results are inconsistent with singularity effect and scope insensitivity Vu et al. (2024) Identifiability No effect of identifiability on altruism on willingness to contribute. ...
The identified victim effect is the phenomenon in which people tend to contribute more to identified than to unidentified victims. Kogut and Ritov (2005a) found that the identified victim effect was limited to a single victim and driven by empathic emotions. In a pre-registered experiment with an online U.S. American MTurk sample on CloudResearch (N = 2003), we conducted a close replication and extension of Experiment 2 from Kogut and Ritov (2005a). The replication findings failed to provide empirical support for the identified single victim effect hypothesis since we found no evidence of differences in willingness to contribute when comparing a single identified victim to a single unidentified victim. (η2p = .00, 90% CI [0.00, 0.00]), and no indication for the target article’s interaction between singularity and identifiability (original: η2p = .062, 90% CI [0.01, 0.15]; replication: η2p = .00, 90% CI [0.00, 0.00]). Extending the replication to conduct a conceptual replication of Kogut and Ritov (2007), we investigated a boundary condition of the effect - group belonging. We found support for an ingroup bias in helping behaviors and indications for empathic emotions and perceived responsibility contributing to this effect. We discuss differences between our study and the target article and implications for the literature on the identified victim effect.
... We also examined a limited set of demographic variables, leaving out key factors (e.g., variations in recycling rules) that could also have a substantial bearing on recycle/reuse behaviors. Next, although our stimulus message related to plastic waste was adapted from various online sources and revised by two experts in the field, message effects are often tied to message framing (Powell et al., 2015), as well as statistical versus emotionally laden information (Small et al., 2007). Thus, future research should delve deeper into these message attributes. ...
Although persuasive messages are designed to motivate individuals to engage in intended behaviors, they do not always work. Often, people follow previously established values and ideologies and dismiss persuasive messages. We examine how participants react to a persuasive message related to plastic pollution and how these reactions shape their willingness to recycle and reuse. Results indicate that environmental values and political ideology are associated with message derogation in distinct ways, which, in turn, affect risk perception, self‐efficacy, and intention to recycle and reuse. Further, past behavior moderates the relationship between message derogation and perceived risk, but not the relationship between message derogation and self‐efficacy. These results suggest that pre‐existing values and ideologies play an important role in message derogation, a hitherto under‐researched phenomenon that has key implications for self‐reported behavioral change. Moreover, past behavior could serve as a powerful lever in steering risk perception and behavioral intent.
... This allows for a relatively clean investigation of the relative importance of impact and responsibility considerations, with limited scope for alternative explanations and minimal noise deriving from unaccounted factors. For instance, since all candidates are equally identifiable and there are no overhead costs, neither the identifiable victim effect(Jenni and Loewenstein, 1997;Small and Loewenstein, 2003;Small, Loewenstein and Slovic, 2007) nor overhead aversion(Baron and Szymanska, 2011; Caviola et al., 2014; Gneezy, Keenan and Gneezy, 2014) can account for how the audience members choose between the three candidates. Likewise, since decision makers cannot keep the money for themselves, differences in their tendencies to give can neither be of influence. ...
We directly compare the influences of impact and responsibility considerations on giving behavior. In moral philosophy, utilitarianism emphasizes the importance of the former, whereas theories of equity and desert argue for the importance of the latter. Our data are from a television show where an audience of one hundred people divides ten thousand euros among three financially distressed candidates, and from independent raters who evaluated various attributes of the candidates and their financial predicaments. We find that the well-being benefit of a donation (“impact”) outweighs the degree to which the candidate had control over the cause of their situation (“responsibility”). Giving increases more with impact than it decreases with responsibility, and the contribution of impact to the fit of our regression models is approximately two-and-a-half times that of responsibility. Additionally, our analysis shows no evidence of discrimination on age, gender, or physical attractiveness.
... Empathy refers to experiencing other people's psychological feelings through self-projection. When individuals treat other people's emotional events as if they were their own emotional events, they produce a greater degree of emotional resonance response [47,[53][54][55][56], thereby inducing a higher level of emotional and motivational significance. Self-other overlap refers to the incorporation of other people's resources, perspectives, and traits into the self-concept [57]. ...
This study employs event-related potential (ERP) to examine the impact of empathic concern on prosocial decision-making with costs in both gain and loss contexts. In this experiment, participants can choose between two types of lottery tickets and pay lottery money to help the target person gain more money or lose less money. The behavioral results showed that regardless of the context of the decision (financial loss or gain), participants tended to help individuals who had induced high empathic concern. ERP results show that compared to the low-empathic-concern condition, the high-empathic-concern condition induced greater P3 amplitude in the gain context. However, this change in P3 amplitude caused by empathic concern did not occur in the context of loss. These findings indicate that empathic concern has different psychological mechanisms that moderate prosocial behavior in gain and loss contexts.
... Taking donation behavior as an example, victim information in an individual (vs. group) frame increases people's giving (Friedrich and McGuire, 2010;Small et al., 2007). ...
People tend to perceive the same information differently depending on whether it is expressed in an individual or a group frame. It has also been found that the individual (vs. group) frame of expression tends to lead to more charitable giving and greater tolerance of wealth inequality. However, little is known about whether the same resource allocation in social interactions elicits distinct responses depending on proposer type. Using the second-party punishment task, this study examined whether the same allocation from different proposers (individual vs. group) leads to differences in recipient behavior and the neural mechanisms. Behavioral results showed that reaction times were longer in the unfair (vs. fair) condition, and this difference was more pronounced when the proposer was the individual (vs. group). Neural results showed that proposer type (individual vs. group) influenced early automatic processing (indicated by AN1, P2, and central alpha band), middle processing (indicated by MFN and right frontal theta band), and late elaborative processing (indicated by P3 and parietal alpha band) of fairness in resource allocation. These results revealed more attentional resources were captured by the group proposer in the early stage of fairness processing, and more cognitive resources were consumed by processing group-proposed unfair allocations in the late stage, possibly because group proposers are less identifiable than individual proposers. The findings provide behavioral and neural evidence for the effects of “individual/group” framing leading to cognitive differences. They also deliver insights into social governance issues, such as punishing individual and/or group violations.
... Sadness seems to elicit actions to help others, perhaps to repair or regulate emotions (Small & Verrochi, 2009) and can even result in negative responses to appeals for action (cf. Small et al., 2007). ...
We use the five level model of emotional leadership at work to the topic of sustainable development. For each level, we review the relevant literature, and provide a summary of the leadership challenge. In the final section we outline specific ways leaders can integrate emotion into the process they already use to lead transformational change.
... It may lead to resource concentration on a few visible beneficiaries, potentially causing an uneven resource distribution . Conversely, leveraging this effect could boost helping willingness and improve fundraising outcomes (Andreoni, 1990;Harbaugh et al., 2007;Small et al., 2007). Thus, indepth research into both the behavioral and neural mechanisms of this effect in online crowdfunding is essential. ...
The phenomenon known as the “identifiable victim effect” describes how individuals tend to offer more assistance to victims they can identify with than to those who are vague or abstract. The neural underpinnings of this effect, however, remain elusive. Our study utilized functional magnetic resonance imaging to delve into how the “identifiable victim effect” influences prosocial decision‐making, considering different types of helping costs, across two distinct tasks. Participants were instructed to decide whether to help a victim with personal information shown (i.e., the identifiable victim) and an unidentifiable one by costing their money (task 1) or physical effort (task 2). Behaviorally, we observed a pronounced preference in both tasks for aiding identifiable victims over anonymous ones, highlighting a robust “identifiable victim effect.” On a neural level, this effect was associated with heightened activity in brain areas like the bilateral temporoparietal junction (TPJ) when participants confronted anonymous victims, potentially indicating a more intensive mentalizing process for less concrete victims. Additionally, we noted that the TPJ's influence on value judgment processes is mediated through its functional connectivity with the medial prefrontal cortex. These insights contribute significantly to our understanding of the psychological and neural dynamics underlying the identifiable victim effect.
... Reason 1: Just as there are several studies that show that active reflection typically has negative effects on an agent's epistemic states, there are also several studies that indicate that it typically has positive effects (e.g., Gagné and Smith (1962);DeWall, Baumeister, and Masicampo (2008) ;Small, Loewenstein, and Slovic (2007)). ...
According to Rettler, there are three types of control that we should consider in relation to the legitimacy of doxastic blame: Intention-based, reason-based, and influence-based control. Rettler argues that among these, influence-based control is the only type of control that is necessary and sufficient for fulfilling the control con-dition required for legitimate doxastic blame. The aim of this short discussion paper is to critically assess Rettler’s view of doxastic con-trol. By doing so, I attempt to defend the reason-responsiveness view from Rettler’s criticism and cast doubt on whether influence-based control has a positive epistemic influence on beliefs.
... For instance, Nordgren and McDonnell (2011) found that people tend to assign higher blame to the agent when the victim is identifiable, as opposed to when the victim is unidentifiable (i.e., faceless). This effect is believed to result from greater sympathy towards personalised victims as compared to "statistical victims" (i.e., faceless masses), which in turn leads to a higher willingness to help identifiable victims (Small et al., 2007;Small & Loewenstein, 2003). In addition, a study by McManus et al. (2020) revealed intriguing dynamics. ...
Doing harm is a moral violation, but helping a family member is morally obligatory. In this study, participants encountered this ethical dilemma through stories featuring their sibling (i.e., brother) as either the perpetrator or victim in various moral scenarios. Subsequently, they provided their moral judgments (i.e., moral acceptability and perceived transgression) and made decisions (i.e., willingness and difficulty to disclose what the agent did to the police) regarding the perpetrator. The manipulation of family membership was integrated into the moral scenarios, which were crafted based on whether the perpetrator had malicious intent and whether those intentions resulted in a harmful outcome (i.e., intentional harm, failed attempts to harm, accidental harm, and a harmless/baseline). While we initially expected that individuals would exhibit favoritism toward their brother when harmful intent or outcomes were absent, our findings revealed that both agent/victim identities (brother/stranger) and intent-outcome-based moral scenarios had an additive effect on both measures of moral judgment. This suggests that the family-favoring effect was observed across all intent-outcome scenarios, with a slightly more pronounced effect when the brother accidentally harmed a stranger compared to a stranger accidentally harming the brother. Regarding moral decisions, participants demonstrated a willingness to disclose what they witnessed regardless of their familial relationship with the agent or victim, but it was universally perceived as a difficult decision to make. Together, our results underscore the context-specific nature of moral judgments and decisions, emphasizing the significant impact of family members when they are involved as moral characters.
... Stories are told with a goal in mind, and in many cases the goal of storytelling is to evoke empathy. Stories that evoke empathy can be more impactful than facts and data [18]. In storytelling Ramayana, the empathy is usually used to teach morals [19]. ...
Telling stories are vital for effective communication. Meaningful, impactful, and memorable stories prepare us to face the challenges in life and makes our lives more livable. However, people face new and evolving challenges to clearly communicate their emotions and intentions affecting their storytelling. Inability to tell a good story could lead to various problems ranging from social unrest to business impact, necessitating the importance of learning storytelling skills. One of the oldest storytelling traditions in the world is telling the story of Ramayana through various art forms. Though storytelling Ramayana in various art forms is popular in many countries, its storytelling in postage stamps is rarely discussed in academic context. This paper argues that storytelling Ramayana on postage stamps could be used as a research material to learn about the ancient tradition of storytelling through arts. We conduct a comparative study of Ramayana stamps in time (multiple years) and space (multiple countries) and show how the characters in Ramayana are expressed over time and space. This work is still preliminary, and in future these findings can be used in applications such as developing storytelling learning activities that use arts as an instructional tool.
... However, research within the broader pro-social domain highlights the risk with interventions aiming to increase impactful behavior by redirecting the focus to the outcome and at the same time ignoring the role of affective processes in motivation. 42 Thus, using information aimed at decreasing the influence of affect and emotion might reduce overall pro-environmental behavior. Suppose an individual believes that a certain behavior they adopt has a considerable impact on reducing emissions. ...
We need unparalleled human behavioral changes to mitigate the effects of climate change. However, recent studies suggest that people are not good at identifying mitigative behaviors that are effective in reducing carbon emissions. Thus, even when there is an intention to engage in climate action, people are not necessarily making the most effective choices. This suggests that there is an impact of neglecting in evaluative judgments about mitigative behaviors. Here, using an online survey (N = 555), we show that people have a rather poor understanding of the mitigation potential of human behaviors, and both impact judgments and the likelihood of adoption of mitigative behaviors are largely influenced by emotional processes. These findings have potential implications for how to motivate impactful climate action in the future and point toward the importance to fully understand how affect and emotions influence impact judgments and pro-environmental behavior.
... We believe that this order of the question was a sensible solution to ensure that willingness to help was not influenced by other factors (ratings of cost and benefit), since this was our main dependent variable. This order of the questions is also consistent with work by Rubaltelli et al. (2020) that used a similar experimental task as well as to what is often done in the charitable giving literature when measuring variables that can influence donations, such as empathy or warm glow (see, for instance, Ritov, 2005a, 2005b;Small et al., 2007;Dickert et al., 2011;Rubaltelli and Agnoli, 2012). Further, to gather further support for our methodological decision, we collected additional data with a sample of adults, in which we counterbalanced the order of the questions (see Supplementary Materials). ...
Previous work showed that the willingness to help is impacted by the perception of the cost for the donor and the benefit for the recipient. Here we set up to extend this literature by investigating the role played by social value orientation (SVO), attention, and age (early adolescents vs. middle-late adolescents vs. young adults). Results showed that these three variables have a significant impact on the perception of the cost and the benefit of a donation. Exploratory analyses showed that perception of the cost is predicted by a three-way interaction between SVO, attention, and age (but the same three-way interaction does not predict the perception of the benefit). Finally, we found that the way the perceived cost and the perceived benefit impact the willingness to help is different for early adolescents compared to the other two groups. Early adolescents’ decisions are less impacted by perceived cost (and more impacted by perceived benefit).
People often rely on numeric metrics to make decisions and form judgments. Numbers can be difficult to process, leading to their underutilization, but they are also uniquely suited to making comparisons. Do people decide differently when some dimensions of a choice are quantified and others are not? We explore this question across 21 preregistered experiments (8 in the main text, N = 9,303; 13 in supplement, N = 13,936) involving managerial, policy, and consumer decisions. Participants face choices that involve tradeoffs (e.g., choosing between employees, one of whom has a higher likelihood of advancement but lower likelihood of retention), and we randomize which dimension of each tradeoff is presented numerically and which is presented qualitatively (using verbal estimates, discrete visualizations, or continuous visualizations). We show that people systematically shift their preferences toward options that dominate on tradeoff dimensions conveyed numerically—a pattern we dub “quantification fixation.” Further, we show that quantification fixation has financial consequences—it emerges in incentive-compatible hiring tasks and in charitable donation decisions. We identify one key mechanism that underlies quantification fixation and moderates its strength: When making comparative judgments, which are essential to tradeoff decisions, numeric information is more fluent than non-numeric information. Our findings suggest that when we count, we change what counts.
This theoretical article summarizes the various psychological and motivational processes that underlie prosocial decision-making. To this aim, we propose a novel way to organize and synthesize research related to emotions, thoughts, and beliefs (i.e., psychological mechanisms) that motivate or demotivate human prosociality. This is done with a new typology including four overarching interrelated categories, each encompassing multiple subcategories: (a) emotions; (b) moral principles; (c) anticipated impact; and (d) anticipated personal consequences. We highlight differences and commonalities to other influential frameworks and showcase how the proposed typology can help researchers and practitioners better differentiate and understand the diverse psychological mechanisms that underlie human prosociality.
Severe shocks, such as natural disasters or major conflicts, can trigger substantial international support in the immediate aftermath. The continuation of support depends on the level of attention in the public discourse. Whereas general attention will inevitably decline with time, a resurgence of fighting could rekindle societal support abroad. Based on daily news coverage relating to 39 European countries, the emergence of such an offsetting effect is evaluated by introducing the concept of conflict pressure to quantify indirect conflict exposure. Societies not directly involved in a major conflict are found to respond to conflict escalation nevertheless: Across all stakeholder groups, attention dedicated to refugees increases temporarily, irrespective of actual support requirements. Providing additional material support to displaced individuals for a prolonged time, in turn, is mostly within the purview of governmental actors and, surprisingly, those from the economy.
Can individual participation in international legal institutions affect state behavior? Much of the existing literature believes that international law has a limited effect in the countries where it’s needed the most, especially in the absence of enforcement mechanisms. Focused on repressive regimes, this paper analyzes petitions (complaints) filed by victims of human rights abuse in United Nations human rights treaty bodies. As a form of naming and shaming, I theorize that violation decisions– in which a monitoring body confirms a treaty violation– may improve human rights when paired with civil society organizations that publicize the decisions. Leveraging a new dataset, I find that governments improve respect for the most severe abuses involving bodily harm immediately after violation decisions. In support of the theory, these short-lived effects are driven by petitions where civil society actors are listed as representation. This work improves our understanding of the role of non-state actors in global politics and compliance with international institutions. International organizations can, under certain conditions, provide information on non-compliance that sufficiently pressures governments to change domestic practices and decrease repression.
We explore in laboratory how donations to a charity can be influenced by the identifiability and the social categorization of the recipients. We find that donors give more, on average, to unidentified than to identified beneficiaries, since the latter are more likely to receive small donations than the former. Average donations are the same for in- and out-group beneficiaries; however, an in-group recipient is more likely to receive a top donation than an out-group one, whereas the latter is more likely than the former to receive an intermediate donation. Both first- and second-order effects are associated to the Dynamic Identity Fusion Index elicited from participants toward the ‘Multicultural World’.
Corporate social irresponsibility (CSI) refers to violations of the social contract between corporations and society. Existing literature documents its tendency to evoke negative consumer responses toward the firm involved, including unethical consumer behaviors. However, limited research attention deals with its potential impacts on prosocial consumer behavior. With six studies, the current research reveals that when consumers perceive harm due to CSI, they engage in more prosocial behavior due to the arousal of their anger. This effect is weaker among consumers who find the focal CSI issue more personally relevant but stronger among consumers with strong self-efficacy for promoting justice. Perceptions of CSI harm increase with the degree of control that the focal firm has over the CSI. This research thus establishes an effect of CSI harm on prosocial consumer behaviors, through the emotional mechanism of anger; it further shows that consumers seek to restore justice by engaging in prosocial behaviors.
To make the process of identifying and recognizing needs more transparent and to postulate a theory of need-based justice, we investigated various frames in which decision problems were embedded. External frames in a strict sense, with gain and loss frames in risky choices and need as an additional factor, showed significant differences in choice frequencies. External frames in a loose sense, such as time constraints, different diseases in an Asian Disease paradigm, and the identifiability of a needy person, showed framing effects and mixed results with respect to need. Internal frames measured by personality inventories also showed mixed results. The dual-stage dual-process model includes a normative part and a descriptive part, which both account for framing effects. In one version of the model, the normative part includes the expected utility model modified by the Stone–Geary function.
This study examines the identifiable victim effect (being more willing to help an identified victim than an unidentified), the singularity effect (i.e., being more willing to help a single identified victim than a group of identified victims), and unit asking (first asking donors for their willingness to donate for one unit and then asking for donations for multiple units) in charitable giving. In five studies (N = 7996), we vary the level of identifiability, singularity, and group size. We find that unit asking is making people more sensitive to the number of people in need. Further, while the level of identifiability influences affective reactions, this effect does not extend to donations and, thus, is not affected by unit asking. We do, however, find an “emotion asking effect” where asking donors to rate their affect before donating increase donation levels (compared to donors asked to rate affect after). Emotion asking was attenuated when combined with unit asking.
This study reviews the unresolved identifiable victim effect (IVE) issues. IVE indicates that people are more willing to help an identified victim than to an unidentified number of victims, such as statistical information. Previous studies have demonstrated the robustness of this phenomenon. However, existing studies on IVE have been conducted primarily in Western cultures and their applicability to East Asian cultures has not been sufficiently examined. Recently, some studies have begun to explore cultural differences in IVE and have suggested that IVE may be less likely to occur in East Asian cultures which exhibit a predominantly interdependent construal of self, compared to Western cultures which exhibit a predominantly independent construal of self. This is the first study to confirm the mechanism of IVE and the methods used to suppress it. Furthermore, studies on meta-analyses and cultural differences in IVE are reviewed, and prospects are discussed.
Charities often use incentives to increase prosocial action. However, charities sometimes downplay these incentives in their messaging (pilot study), possibly to avoid demotivating donors. We challenge this strategy, examining whether increasing the salience of incentives for prosocial action can in fact motivate charitable behavior. Three controlled experiments ( N = 2,203 adults) and a field study with an alumni-donation campaign ( N = 22,468 adults) found that more (vs. less) salient incentives are more effective at increasing prosocial behavior when prosocial motivation is low (vs. high). This is because more (vs. less) salient incentives increase relative consideration of self-interest (vs. other-regarding) benefits, which is a stronger driver of behavior at low (vs. high) levels of prosocial motivation. By identifying that prosocial motivation moderates the effect of incentive salience on charitable behavior, and by detailing the underlying mechanism, we advance theory and practice on incentive salience, motivation, and charitable giving.
Although researchers have considered the role of morality in consumer psychology over the years, such investigations often fail to (a) recognize the different values that consumers might hold, and (b) provide proper context for why different moral considerations emerge. Moral Foundations Theory (MFT; Graham et al., Advances in experimental social psychology , 2013, Academic Press; Haidt & Joseph, Daedalus , 2004, 133, 55) provides just such a conceptual framework for understanding the diversity of moral thought that exists across cultures and demographic groups. MFT describes morality not as a monolithic entity, but as a pluralistic set of intuitive values that were shaped by evolutionary pressures and edited by distinct cultures. We review the central claims of MFT and describe how the theory can offer new insights when applied to consumer psychology, providing examples from existing research on persuasion, emotion, and prosocial behavior.
Dramatic events can evoke feelings of compassion, fear, or threat, and can affect public opinion regarding controversial issues. Such an event was the drowning of 3-year-old Alan Kurdi, a Syrian boy whose body washed up on a Turkish shore, and was photographed, producing an iconic image that was seen worldwide. The image evoked empathy and compassion that neuroscience and psychological research associate with a motivation to help. This article examines the impact of this event on four different aspects of attitudes toward immigration. The timing of the European Social Survey in Portugal allowed us to use this tragic event as a natural experiment. Our results suggest that Kurdi’s drowning had a significant effect on only two sentiments, but no such impact was detected on other attitudes. The results show that the event did not change the respondents’ opinion regarding the possible negative consequences of immigration on the host country’s economy, crime level, or culture, nor did it change their perception of the skills required by immigrants. On the other hand, the empathy induced by the tragic event increased their willingness to have a less restrictive immigration policy and their openness to having close social relationships with immigrants, although these changes were short-lived.
We make decisions and our decisions affect others as well as ourselves. However, we cannot always think in a completely rational way. Therefore, studies relating to understanding biases affecting decisions and eliminating negative effects of these biases can help us to improve our decisions. In this chapter, omission bias, identifiable victim effect, punishment without deterrence, ex-ante equality, and parochialism, which are considered deviations from utilitarianism, are examined. The reasons for the occurrence of them and some possible effects of these biases on the decisions taken and policies created are discussed. Ways to improve rational thinking and to reduce the negative effects of these biases are mentioned.
This article argues that the representation of future generations is likely to remain inadequate because of the lack of accountability mechanisms characteristic of representative relations among contemporaries. Two problems pertaining to the representation of future generations and their interests are distinguished, namely misrepresentation and negligence. Misrepresentation refers to ill-informed, biased, and purposive interpretations regarding the interests of future generations, whereas negligence involves future interests not being properly considered in policymaking. While these two problems are often intertwined, misrepresentation is a problem of epistemic and normative judgments, whereas negligence is a motivational problem. The interests of future generations are especially likely to be neglected in cases of so-called intergenerational conflict, that is, situations of welfare tradeoffs between present and future generations. Inclusive democratic deliberation is a remedy for misrepresentation, but its capacity to address negligence may be more limited. Finally, the article remarks on the role of future-regarding deliberation in representative democratic systems.
Priority setting is inevitable to control expenditure on expensive medicines, but citizen support is often hampered by the workings of the ‘identified victim effect’, that is, the greater willingness to spend resources helping identified victims than helping statistical victims. In this paper we explore a possible cognitive debiasing strategy that is being employed in discussions on healthcare priority setting, which we call ‘empathy counterbalancing’ (EC). EC is the strategy of directing attention to, and eliciting empathy for, those who might be harmed as a result of one-sided empathy for the very ill who needs expensive treatment. We argue that governments have good reasons to attempt EC because the identified victim effect distorts priority setting in ways that undermine procedural fairness. We briefly outline three areas of application for EC and suggest some possible mechanisms that might explain how EC might work, if at all. We then discuss four potential ethical concerns with EC. First, EC might have the counterproductive effect of reducing overall citizen support for public funding of expensive medical treatments, thereby undermining solidarity. Second, EC may give rise to a ‘competition in suffering’, which may have unintended side effects for patients who feature in attempts at EC. Third, there may be doubts about whether EC is effective. Fourth, it may be objected that EC comes down to emotional manipulation, which governments should avoid. We conclude that insofar these concerns are valid they may be adequately addressed, and that EC seems a promising strategy that merits further investigation.
Children and young adolescents often tend to behave dishonestly in order to serve their self-interests. This study focused on how empathic abilities affect children's tendency to deceive others. Deception is the act of causing others to form a false belief to get them to act in a way that serves the deceiver's interests. As such, it requires the ability to predict how others might use the provided information. In two experiments, 274 participants (aged 10-16 years) played a game in which they could send a deceptive message to another participant to boost their own payoff at the other player's expense. We measured participants' cognitive and emotional empathy using different measures. We found that a measure of cognitive empathy, namely the fantasy scale, was associated with less deception of another player when that other player was not identified and was presented only as ''Player B." However, when Player B was identified by name, empathy did not predict deception. In such cases, the only factors affecting deception rates were the gain for the participant (higher possible gains lead to more deception) and loss to the other player (higher possible losses lead to less deception). Overall, the findings suggest that even by 11 years of age, children can understand the impact of their unethical behavior on another child and adjust their actions accordingly. However, when the other child is not identified, children need to possess high levels of cognitive empathy toward imagined individuals to resist the temptation to deceive the other child.
Understanding the mechanisms that guide non-governmental organizations’ (NGOs) managerial decisions is a key to effective development policies. One fundamentally strategic decision is the number of activities an NGO offers. We provide a conceptual framework based on the agency theory to study the motivations underlying strategic decisions of development NGOs in Uganda. We test whether diversifying into many activities is driven by operational reasons or by personal gains of NGO managers. Following a historic flood in 2007, NGOs that rely more on contractual income offer fewer activities than their counterparts in less affected areas. The results support theoretical explanations that operational motives such as risk-reduction or cost complementarity dominate personal and for-profit-like motives. Our article contributes to the debates around the ethical and governmental foundation of the non-profit sector, highlighting the different roles of personal and operational aspects in the decision-making process.
Past research on social influence finds that, all else being equal, a group of people engaged in a particular behavior is generally more influential than a single individual in inspiring others to adopt that behavior. The current research challenges this seemingly intuitive idea by showing that its validity depends on whether the focal behavior is selfish. Seven experiments show that while multiple people are indeed more influential than a single individual in encouraging unselfish behavior, a single individual can be just as influential as multiple people in encouraging selfish behavior. We present evidence that this phenomenon occurs because people generally have a preference for the selfish option and seek justification for their actions. Selfish behavior, whether exhibited by a single individual or a group of people, provides a convenient justification consistent with their preference for selfish behavior. When it comes to unselfish behavior, however, a larger group of influencers is required to counteract their self-benefiting tendencies. Supporting this mechanism, the effect is reversed when people have a pre-existing preference for unselfishness or when selfish behavior is difficult to justify.
Although textual and facial emotion expressions in prosocial appeals have been studied separately in past research, there has been little work on the misalignment (compared to alignment) between them. Using a multi-method approach comprising experiments and panel data of 6,098 crowdfunding projects from Gofundme, we investigate how emotions expressed in the cover image and the project description interact to increase potential donors’ engagement as measured by metrics relevant to the platform, i.e., donation amount per donor. More specifically, we focus on the misalignment (vs. alignment) between happy and sad facial expressions in images and the positive and negative emotions in the project description. Our empirical analysis shows that misalignment scenarios have a bigger positive impact on the donor’s contributed amount, compared to alignment scenarios. We also show that such a relative impact is heterogeneous and differs based on expressed urgency, beneficiary age, and progress towards donation goal. We make a theoretical contribution via assessing the extent of cognitive processing in misalignment vs alignment cases. We propose situations with a tradeoff such that the extent of cognitive processing of multimodal information content can be reduced due to simultaneous activation of affective processing. Our research provides strategic recommendations for platforms to increase donors’ engagement and platform revenue management.
Cyberspace has significantly influenced people's perceptions of social interactions and communication. As a result, the conventional theories of kin selection and reciprocal altruism fall short in completely elucidating online prosocial behavior. Based on the social information processing model, we propose an analytical framework to explain the donation behaviors on online platform. Through collecting textual and visual data from Tencent Gongyi platform pertaining to disease relief projects, and employing techniques encompassing text analysis, image analysis, and propensity score matching, we investigate the impact of both internal emotional cues and external contextual cues on donation behaviors. It is found that positive emotions tend to attract a larger number of donations, while negative emotions tend to result in higher per capita donation amounts. Furthermore, these effects manifest differently under distinct external contextual conditions.
Which social decisions are influenced by intuitive processes? Which by deliberative processes? The dual-process approach to human sociality has emerged in the last decades as a vibrant and exciting area of research. Yet a perspective that integrates empirical and theoretical work is lacking. This review and meta-analysis synthesizes the existing literature on the cognitive basis of cooperation, altruism, truth telling, positive and negative reciprocity, and deontology and develops a framework that organizes the experimental regularities. The meta-analytic results suggest that intuition favors a set of heuristics that are related to the instinct for self-preservation: people avoid being harmed, avoid harming others (especially when there is a risk of harm to themselves), and are averse to disadvantageous inequalities. Finally, this article highlights some key research questions to further advance our understanding of the cognitive foundations of human sociality.
L’empathie joue un rôle fondamental dans la motivation à vouloir le bien-être des autres. Cependant, elle a des coûts cognitifs, émotionnels et énergétiques. Elle est limitée et fragile. Cet article intègre des connaissances en provenance de la théorie de l’évolution, des neurosciences, de la psychologie et de l’économie comportementale pour démontrer pourquoi et comment l’empathie est non-consciemment et rapidement modulée par divers signaux sociaux et facteurs situationnels. L’empathie n’est donc pas toujours une source d’information fiable dans la prise de décision morale. Ce cadre théorique des neurosciences sociales explique que la prise de décision guidée par l’empathie seule peut parfois éroder nos valeurs éthiques. Clarifier le rôle de l’empathie dans les processus de décision morale a des implications dans les domaines du droit, de la santé et des politiques publiques.
This dissertation examines the question, how moral sensitivity can be promoted with digital games. Moral sensitivity alerts people to ethical problems, i.e., actions that could conflict with ethical norms, standards, values, and principles, or which have the potential to affect others’ wellbeing or the pursuit of their legitimate interests. The dissertation pursues two major research objectives. First, there is a lack of a unified theory on the nature of moral sensitivity, which integrates normative demands with empirical findings from various streams of research. A multitude of different ideas currently coexist on the nature of moral sensitivity. Prior efforts to integrate theories have been purely normative, ignoring contradictory empirical evidence. Empirically informed theories, on the other hand, tend to ignore findings that point to other explanations. The lack of an adequate theory of moral sensitivity stands in the way of systematic efforts to promote moral sensitivity, including through digital games. To fill this gap, this dissertation aims at proposing an empirically founded theory of moral sensitivity.
Secondly, there is a lack of empirically informed recommendations on the use of digital games for the promotion of moral sensitivity. The major weaknesses of previous attempts to provide guidance on the promotion of moral sensitivity via digital games consist in (1) a lack of clarity about the goal of moral-sensitivity training, (2) a lack of knowledge on suitable strategies to promote moral sensitivity in general, and (3) a failure to take empirical findings on the effects of digital games on the development moral sensitivity and its components into consideration. This dissertation aims at overcoming these three limitations of previous research in proposing a first evidence-based framework for the promotion of moral sensitivity with digital games.
The first part of this dissertation investigates the nature of moral sensitivity from a normative perspective. A critical analysis of the need for moral sensitivity suggests that its function is to alert people to ethical problems accurately, affectively, automatically, and autonomously. This position is elaborated in confrontation with alternative ideas, e.g., the belief that controlled deliberation should be involved in noticing ethical problems. The following examination of ethical demands on a good moral sensitivity from the perspectives of four paradigms of normative ethics suggests that three abilities are required: (1) a recognitional moral sensitivity enables people to notice ethical problems due to a refined understanding of ethical concepts and corresponding attitudes; (2) a sympathetic moral sensitivity enables people to notice ethical problems due to a concern for those who are affected by their actions; (3) a critical moral sensitivity enables people to notice when their sympathetic and recognitional moral sensitivity could be undermined or biased due to factors like conflicts of interest or fatigue.
The second part of this dissertation investigates the nature of moral sensitivity from an empirical perspective. Studies were analyzed and synthesized, which can legitimately claim to investigate moral sensitivity based on valid tests of people’s ability to notice ethical problems. The findings support and help to refine the idea that moral sensitivity bears a recognitional, a sympathetic, and a critical component. Moral expertise, i.e., refined knowledge of ethical concepts, is shown to be indispensable for the recognition of subtle ethical problems – particularly when people have competing objectives or face stress. Moral expertise, on its own, appears to be insufficient, however, if it is not combined with appropriate attitudes towards ethical problems, which motivate people to notice them in the first place, and which trigger appropriate emotional responses in people (e.g., guilt at the thought of ignoring someone’s will). Contrarily, many social and emotional competences that have been viewed as helping people to notice ethical problems, e.g., perspective-taking skills, do not appear to be reliable sources of moral sensitivity. What seems to make a big difference, however, is whether people hold sympathetic and unprejudiced attitudes towards the people who are affected by their actions, as a lack of sympathy and demeaning attitudes will inhibit people’s ability to notice when their actions may be immoral. Finally, the evidence culminates in showing how moral sensitivity can be undermined and biased in various ways, e.g., due to stronger empathic reactions to people who are immediately present. To cope with various sources of bias, people also need to cultivate an automatized ability to recognize when their moral perception could be biased.
The final third of this dissertation concentrates on the question, how digital games can be used to promote moral sensitivity. Building on the unified theory of moral sensitivity that was established in the prior parts, strategies were identified that are generally effective in promoting moral sensitivity. The most effective approach appears to be experiential learning in combination with feedback on people’s ability to notice ethical problems. Digital games are found to provide an optimal environment for the provision of this kind of training, because they can motivate learners to engage with ethical problems in an interactive manner, provide appropriate feedback, and do all of this in a safe context. Twenty-four game mechanisms are explored in view of their potential to promote recognitional, sympathetic, and critical moral sensitivity, whereby the findings of more than 80 empirical studies are synthesized. Several game mechanisms are found to be highly promising, while there is a lack of empirical information on others, and some mechanisms appear to bear risks, e.g., the use of egoistic temptations. A critical discussion of different ways in dealing with the risk of malicious play, i.e., the performance of unethical actions in games, suggests that digital games could undermine moral sensitivity, if they provide players with reasons to justify malicious play. On the other hand, when bad choices and malicious play are confronted with negative feedback and bad consequences, the possibility to make ethical mistakes appears to be legitimate and highly useful.
Companies often rely on customer feedback to build and improve their business. Customers, in turn, are expected to (i) fill in customer feedback surveys (participation) and (ii) provide accurate responses (performance). To encourage active participation and ensure accurate responses, companies traditionally offer either self‐benefiting incentives, like lottery prizes, or prosocial incentives, like charity donations. More recently, some companies have started offering prosocial incentives on top of self‐benefiting incentives in the hope to “sweeten the deal,” that is, to improve participation and performance even further. With this research, we challenge whether the on‐top prosocial incentives are effective. The evidence from two field experiments and one incentive‐aligned online experiment does not confirm any such advantage. In contrast, performance can decrease when a low‐amount on‐top prosocial incentive is offered relative to a pure self‐benefiting setting. This trend is only reversed once the on‐top incentive amount increases. Furthermore, for participation, we find that on‐top prosocial incentives are ineffective and, at higher amounts, even detrimental. Therefore, our empirical insights rather suggest that on‐top prosocial incentives “poison the well.”
The identifiable victim effect describes the stronger tendency to help a specific victim than to help a group of unidentified statistical victims. Our reanalysis of a meta-analysis on the effect by Lee and Freely (2016) using robust Bayesian meta-analysis suggested publication bias in the literature and the need to revisit the phenomenon. We conducted a pre-registered far replication and extension of Studies 1 and 3 in Small et al. (2007), a seminal demonstration of the identifiable victim effect, with hypothetical donations. We examined the impact of deliberative thinking on the identifiable victim effect both by directly informing participants of the effect (Study 1) and by providing an identified victim with statistical information (Study 3). We found no empirical support for the identifiable victim effect (η_p^2= .000, 95% CI [.000, .003]) and subsequently no support for debiasing such a phenomenon (η_p^2= .001, 95% CI[.000, .012]). These findings suggest that the identifiable victim may be better framed in terms of ‘scope-insensitivity’. In other words, rather than providing more to a single identified victim, participants seem to be insensitive to the number of victims affected. However, our study involved only hypothetical donations rather than a real-effort real-donation paradigm as in Small et al. (2007). Therefore, we hope that our results spark motivation for future high-powered replications with real money donations, ideally carried out as registered reports and in collaboration with proponents of the original effect. Materials, data, and code were made available on the OSF: https://osf.io/n4jkh/
In this chapter, the authors investigate the role of lay beliefs in protecting our minds against unwanted influences on our own beliefs and emotions—what the authors call mental contamination. People's naive theories about how and when their beliefs and emotions could change determine the specific strategy they follow in order not to be contaminated. The authors suggest that we distinguish between an implicit level of psychology which operates largely outside our awareness (people's use of schematic knowledge) and an explicit level of psychology (meta-beliefs about cognitive processes). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
A fundamental principle of psychophysics is that people's ability to discriminate change in a physical stimulus diminishes as the magnitude of the stimulus increases. We find that people also exhibit diminished sensitivity in valuing lifesaving interventions against a background of increasing numbers of lives at risk. We call this psychophysical numbing. Studies 1 and 2 found that an intervention saving a fixed number of lives was judged significantly more beneficial when fewer lives were at risk overall. Study 3 found that respondents wanted the minimum number of lives a medical treatment would have to save to merit a fixed amount of funding to be much greater for a disease with a larger number of potential victims than for a disease with a smaller number. The need to better understand the dynamics of psychophysical numbing and to determine its effects on decision making is discussed.
We consider the problem of the evolution of the interface given by two incompressible fluids through a porous medium, which
is known as the Muskat problem and in two dimensions it is mathematically analogous to the two-phase Hele–Shaw cell. We focus
on a fluid interface given by a jump of densities, being the equation of the evolution obtained using Darcy’s law. We prove
local well-posedness when the smaller density is above (stable case) and in the unstable case we show ill-posedness.
Affect is considered by most contemporary theories to be postcognitive,
that is, to occur only after considerable cognitive operations have
been accomplished. Yet a number of experimental results on preferences,
attitudes, impression formation, and decision making, as well as
some clinical phenomena, suggest that affective judgments may be
fairly independent of, and precede in time, the sorts of perceptual
and cognitive operations commonly assumed to be the basis of these
affective judgments. Affective reactions to stimuli are often the
very first reactions of the organism, and for lower organisms they
are the dominant reactions. Affective reactions can occur without
extensive perceptual and cognitive encoding, are made with greater
confidence than cognitive judgments, and can be made sooner. Experimental
evidence is presented demonstrating that reliable affective discriminations
(likedislike ratings) can be made in the total absence of recognition
memory (oldnew judgments). Various differences between judgments
based on affect and those based on perceptual and cognitive processes
are examined. It is concluded that affect and cognition are under
the control of separate and partially independent systems that can
influence each other in a variety of ways, and that both constitute
independent sources of effects in information processing. (139 ref)
(PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2009 APA, all rights reserved)
Distinctions have been proposed between systems of reasoning for centuries.
This article distills properties shared by many of these distinctions
and characterizes the resulting systems in light of recent findings
and theoretical developments. One system is associative because its
computations reflect similarity structure and relations of temporal
contiguity. The other is "rule based" because it operates on symbolic
structures that have logical content and variables and because its
computations have the properties that are normally assigned to rules.
The systems serve complementary functions and can simultaneously
generate different solutions to a reasoning problem. The rule-based
system can suppress the associative system but not completely inhibit
it. The article reviews evidence in favor of the distinction and
its characterization.
The Muskat problem models the evolution of the interface given by two
different fluids in porous media. The Rayleigh-Taylor condition is natural to
reach the linear stability of the Muskat problem. We show that the
Rayleigh-Taylor condition may hold initially but break down in finite time. As
a consequence of the method used, we prove the existence of water waves
turning.
The Muskat problem models the dynamics of the interface between two incompressible immiscible fluids with different constant densities. In this work we prove three results. First we prove an maximum principle, in the form of a new ``log'' conservation law \eqref{ln} which is satisfied by the equation \eqref{ec1d} for the interface. Our second result is a proof of global existence of Lipschitz continuous solutions for initial data that satisfy and . We take advantage of the fact that the bound is propagated by solutions, which grants strong compactness properties in comparison to the log conservation law. Lastly, we prove a global existence result for unique strong solutions if the initial data is smaller than an explicitly computable constant, for instance . Previous results of this sort used a small constant which was not explicit. Comment: 31 pages
We consider in this paper the Muskat problem in a periodic geometry and
incorporate capillary as well as gravity effects in the modelling. The problem
re-writes as an abstract evolution equation and we use this property to prove
well-posedness of the problem and to establish exponential stability of some
flat equilibrium. Using bifurcation theory we also find finger shaped
steady-states which are all unstable.
In this work we consider weak solutions of the incompressible 2-D porous
media equation. By using the approach of De Lellis-Sz\'ekelyhidi we prove
non-uniqueness for solutions in in space and time.
This article examines how consumer decision making is influenced by automatically evoked task-induced affect and by cognitions that are generated in a more controlled manner on exposure to alternatives in a choice task. Across two experiments respondents chose between two alternatives: one (chocolate cake) associated with more intense positive affect but less favorable cognitions, compared to a second (fruit salad) associated with less favorable affect but more favorable cognitions. Findings from the two experiments suggest that if processing resources are limited, spontaneously evoked affective reactions rather than cognitions tend to have a greater impact on choice. As a result, the consumer is more likely to choose the alternative that is superior on the affective dimension but inferior on the cognitive dimension (e.g., chocolate cake). In contrast, when the availability of processing resources is high, cognitions related to the consequences of choosing the alternatives tend to have a bigger impact on choice compared to when the availability of these resources is low. As a result, the consumer is more likely to choose the alternative that is inferior on the affective dimension but superior on the cognitive dimension (e.g., fruit salad). The moderating roles of the mode of presentation of the alternatives and of a personality variable related to impulsivity are also reported. Copyright 1999 by the University of Chicago.
When an attitude changes from A1 to A2, what happens to A1? Most theories assume, at least implicitly, that the new attitude replaces the former one. The authors argue that a new attitude can override, but not replace, the old one, resulting in dual attitudes. Dual attitudes are defined as different evaluations of the same attitude object: an automatic, implicit attitude and an explicit attitude. The attitude that people endorse depends on whether they have the cognitive capacity to retrieve the explicit attitude and whether this overrides their implicit attitude. A number of literatures consistent with these hypotheses are reviewed, and the implications of the dual-attitude model for attitude theory and measurement are discussed. For example, by including only explicit measures, previous studies may have exaggerated the ease with which people change their attitudes. Even if an explicit attitude changes, an implicit attitude can remain the same.
Research has consistently found that liberals and conservatives generate different attributions for the causes of social problems and respond differently to people who have internal-controllable causes for needing help. Five studies using a variety of methods (the "college bowl" paradigm, the attitude-attribution paradigm, 2 surveys with nationally representative samples, and an experiment that assessed attributional judgments under varying levels of cognitive load) explored whether these differences could be explained by (a) underlying dispositional differences in the tendency to see the causes of behavior as personally or situationally located, (b) ideological scripts, or (c) differences in the motivation to correct personal attributions. Results were most consistent with the motivated correction explanation. The findings shed further light on the cognitive strategies and motivational priorities of liberals and conservatives.
This research investigated the relationship between the magnitude or scope of a stimulus and its subjective value by contrasting 2 psychological processes that may be used to construct preferences: valuation by feeling and valuation by calculation. The results show that when people rely on feeling, they are sensitive to the presence or absence of a stimulus (i.e., the difference between 0 and some scope) but are largely insensitive to further variations of scope. In contrast, when people rely on calculation, they reveal relatively more constant sensitivity to scope. Thus, value is nearly a step function of scope when feeling predominates and is closer to a linear function when calculation predominates. These findings may allow for a novel interpretation of why most real-world value functions are concave and how the processes responsible for nonlinearity of value may also contribute to nonlinear probability weighting.
This article describes a 2-systems model that explains social behavior as a joint function of reflective and impulsive processes. In particular, it is assumed that social behavior is controlled by 2 interacting systems that follow different operating principles. The reflective system generates behavioral decisions that are based on knowledge about facts and values, whereas the impulsive system elicits behavior through associative links and motivational orientations. The proposed model describes how the 2 systems interact at various stages of processing, and how their outputs may determine behavior in a synergistic or antagonistic fashion. It extends previous models by integrating motivational components that allow more precise predictions of behavior. The implications of this reflective-impulsive model are applied to various phenomena from social psychology and beyond. Extending previous dual-process accounts, this model is not limited to specific domains of mental functioning and attempts to integrate cognitive, motivational, and behavioral mechanisms.
In the ideal vision of public finance, each dollar of government spending is allocated to the area where it can do the most good, and taxes are levied and revenues spent to the point where the marginal value of a public dollar is equal to that of a private dollar. Reality falls short of this ideal in many ways. The political system doesn't necessarily aggregate preferences the way a market would; politicians and government workers may be corrupt or have their own personal agendas; and different groups have different incentives and capabilities to coordinate and lobby for their interests. Here we focus on yet another reason for why taxation and government spending can go awry: human psychology, and specifically the lack of proportionality between human sympathy and the wants and needs of those toward whom the sympathy, or lack thereof, is directed. As Adam Smith observed in the Theory of Moral Sentiments, we often feel little sympathy toward people who deserve it. He illustrates the point vividly with the hypothetical case of a European man who gets more upset over losing his little finger than over a calamity that wipes out a large fraction of the population of China. However, the disproportionality can also go in the opposite direction. As Smith also points out, "we sometimes feel for another, a passion of which he himself seems to be altogether incapable," as illustrated by the dismay of the mother of a sick child which, as he puts it, "feels only the uneasiness of the present instant, which can never be great" (1759/2000, 8). Smith adds dryly that "we sympathize even with the dead, who themselves experience nothing" (1759/2000, 8). Our main focus here is on a specific source of arbitrariness in human sympathy: The disproportionate sympathy and attention to identifiable rather than statistical victims.
When a viscous fluid filling the voids in a porous medium is driven forwards by the pressure of another driving fluid, the interface between them is liable to be unstable if the driving fluid is the less viscous of the two. This condition occurs in oil fields. To describe the normal modes of small disturbances from a plane interface and their rate of growth, it is necessary to know, or to assume one knows, the conditions which must be satisfied at the interface. The simplest assumption, that the fluids remain completely separated along a definite interface, leads to formulae which are analogous to known expressions developed by scientists working in the oil industry, and also analogous to expressions representing the instability of accelerated interfaces between fluids of different densities. In the latter case the instability develops into round-ended fingers of less dense fluid penetrating into the more dense one. Experiments in which a viscous fluid confined between closely spaced parallel sheets of glass, a Hele-Shaw cell, is driven out by a less viscous one reveal a similar state. The motion in a Hele-Shaw cell is mathematically analogous to two-dimensional flow in a porous medium. Analysis which assumes continuity of pressure through the interface shows that a flow is possible in which equally spaced fingers advance steadily. The ratio lambda = (width of finger)/ (spacing of fingers) appears as the parameter in a singly infinite set of such motions, all of which appear equally possible. Experiments in which various fluids were forced into a narrow Hele-Shaw cell showed that single fingers can be produced, and that unless the flow is very slow lambda = (width of finger)/(width of channel) is close to 1/2, so that behind the tips of the advancing fingers the widths of the two columns of fluid are equal. When lambda =1/2 the calculated form of the fingers is very close to that which is registered photographically in the Hele-Shaw cell, but at very slow speeds where the measured value of lambda increased from 1/2 to the limit 1\cdot 0 as the speed decreased to zero, there were considerable differences. Assuming that these might be due to surface tension, experiments were made in which a fluid of small viscosity, air or water, displaced a much more viscous oil. It is to be expected in that case that lambda would be a function of mu U/T only, where mu is the viscosity, U the speed of advance and T the interfacial tension. This was verified using air as the less viscous fluid penetrating two oils of viscosities 0\cdot 30 and 4\cdot 5 poises.
Consumers often face emotion-laden choices involving conflicting goals of personal importance (e.g., safety). Research suggests that consumers cope with the negative emotion associated with these choices by avoiding certain behaviors, in particular attribute trade-off making. This research investigates a factor that moderates these coping effects. Four experiments show that simple cognitive load can make consumers less averse to making attribute trade-offs. This research demonstrates, counterintuitively, that a reduction of cognitive resources through increased load can result in more normative decision behavior. Load apparently disinhibits trade-off making by disrupting consumers' abilities to consider relevant self goal information and the negative emotional consequences of trading off something of personal importance, thereby reducing consumers' need to cope.
Costly life-saving interventions can often be described not only in terms of the number of lives that may be saved but also in terms of the proportion of lives saved out of some total number at risk. In a phenomenon that has been referred to as psychophysical numbing (PN), Fetherstonhaugh, Slovic, Johnson, and Friedrich (1997) found that participants rated an intervention saving a fixed number of lives to be less worth investing in when more total lives were at risk (i.e., when saved lives represented a smaller proportion of the total threat or problem). In two new experiments, life-valuation correlates of PN responding, as well as manipulations of death salience, accountability, and economics focus, were explored in the context of students’ willingness to support mandatory antilock brake requirements for new cars. PN responding was pervasive, but non-PN responders were clearly distinguished by the greater overall value they placed on saving lives. Salience and accountability manipulations did not debias judgments but did tend to rule out low-effort processing as an explanation for these quantity confusions. An emphasis on economic considerations was consistently related to greater PN responding.
In this paper the Muskat problem which describes a two-phase flow of two fluids, for example, oil and water, in porous media is discussed. The problem involves in seeking two time-dependent harmonic functions u1(x,y,t) and u2(x,y,t) in oil and water regions, respectively, and the interface between oil and water, i.e., the free boundary Γ:y=ρ(x,t), such that on the free boundary u1=u2,Vn=−k1∂u1∂n=−k2∂u2∂n, where n the unit normal vector on the free boundary toward oil region, Vn is the normal velocity of the free boundary Γ, k1 and k2 are positive constants satisfying k1>k2. We prove the existence of classical solution globally in time under some reasonable assumptions. The argument developed in this paper can be used in any multidimensional case.
The authors analyse an equation governing the motion of an interface between two fluids in a pressure field. In two dimensions, the interface is described by a conformal mapping which is analytic in the exterior of the unit disc. This mapping obeys a non-local nonlinear equation. When there is no pumping at infinity, there is conservation of area and contraction of the length of the interface. They prove global in time existence for small analytic perturbations of the circle as well as nonlinear asymptotic stability of the steady circular solution. The same method yields well-posedness of the Cauchy problem in the presence of pumping.
We draw out implications of the identifiable victim effect - the greater sympathy shown toward identifiable than statistical victims - for public finance. We first review research showing (1) that people respond more strongly to identifiable than statistical victims even when identification provides absolutely no information about the victims, (2) that the identifiable victim effect is a special case of a more general tendency to react more strongly to identifiable others whether they evoke sympathy or other emotions, and (3) that identifiability influences behavior via the emotional reactions it evokes. Next, we discuss the normative status of the effect, noting that, contrary to the usual assumption that people overreact to identifiable victims, identifiability can shift people's responses in a normatively desirable direction if people are otherwise insufficiently sympathetic toward statistical victims. Finally, we examine implications of the identifiable victim effect for public finance. We show that the identifiable victim effect can influence the popularity of different policies, for example, naturally favoring hidden taxes over those whose incidence is more easily assessed, since a hidden tax has no identifiable victims. Identifiable other effects also influence public discourse, with much of the debate about government spending and taxation being driven by vivid exemplars - iconic victims and perpetrators - rather than any rational calculation of costs and benefits.
The Muskat, or Muskat-Leibenzon, problem describes the evolution of the interface between two immiscible fluids in a porous medium or Hele-Shaw cell under applied pressure gradients or fluid injection/extraction. In contrast to the Hele-Shaw problem (the one-phase version of the Muskat problem), there are few nontrivial exact solutions or analytic results for the Muskat problem. For the stable, forward Muskat problem, in which the higher-viscosity fluid expands into the lower-viscosity fluid, we show global-in-time existence for initial data that is a small perturbation of a flat interface. The initial data in this result may contain weak (e.g., curvature) singularities. For the unstable, backward problem, in which the higher-viscosity fluid contracts, we construct singular solutions that start off with smooth initial data but develop a point of infinite curvature at finite time. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Prior research has confirmed Thomas Schelling's observation that people are more sympathetic and hence generous toward specific identified victims than toward “statistical” victims who are yet to be identified. In the study presented in this article we demonstrate an equivalent effect for punitiveness. We find that people are more punitive toward identified wrongdoers than toward equivalent, but unidentified, wrongdoers, even when identifying the wrongdoer conveys no meaningful information about him or her. To account for the effect of identifiability on both generosity and punitiveness, we propose that affective reactions of any type are stronger toward an identified than toward an unidentified target. Consistent with such an account, the effect of identifiability on punishing behavior was mediated by self-reported anger. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
People's greater willingness to help identified victims, relative to non-identified ones, was examined by varying the singularity of the victim (single vs. a group of eight individuals), and the availability of individually identifying information (the main difference being the inclusion of a picture in the “identified” versions). Results support the proposal that the “identified victim” effect is largely restricted to situations with a single victim: the identified single victim elicited considerably more contributions than the non-identified single victim, while the identification of the individual group members had essentially no effect on willingness to contribute. Participants also report experiencing distress when the victim is single and identified more than in any other condition. Hence, the emotional reaction to the victims appears to be a major source of the effect. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
The problem of the encroachment of water into an oil sand is formulated as a new type of potential problem, namely, that of finding potential distributions in two regions of different ``constants'' (``conductivities'') which are separated by a surface, each point of which has a velocity proportional to the vector gradient of the potential at the point, and such that the area swept out by the moving interface assumes the ``constant'' appropriate to that of the encroaching side of the interface. The cases of strictly linear, radial and spherical systems, in which the shapes of the interfaces are evident from symmetry requirements, are solved in detail and discussed graphically. The zeroth approximation to the general problem which gives the history of a line of fluid particles in a homogeneous system is also treated in detail. Analytical and graphical solutions are presented for (1) systems with elliptical boundaries, (2) an infinite linear source driving fluid into an isolated sink, and (3) the history of a ring of fluid particles travelling from a source to a sink. The relation of the analytical results to the practical problems of the encroachment of water into oil bearing sands is discussed both for the solutions of the general problem and those of the zeroth approximation.
People’s greater willingness to help identified victims, relative to non-identified ones, was examined by eliciting real contributions to targets varying in singularity (a single individual vs. a group of several individuals), and the availability of individually identifying information (the main difference being the inclusion of a picture in the “identified” versions). Results of the first and second experiments support the proposal that for identified victims, contributions for a single victim exceed contributions for a group when these are judged separately, but preference reverses when one has to choose between contributing to the single individual and contributing to the group. In a third experiment, ratings of emotional response were elicited in addition to willingness to contribute judgments. Results suggest that the greater contribution to a single victim relative to the group stems from intensified emotions evoked by a single identified victim rather than from emotions evoked by identified victims in general.
This paper introduces a theoretical framework that describes the importance of affect in guiding judgments and decisions. As used here, “affect” means the specific quality of “goodness” or “badness” (i) experienced as a feeling state (with or without consciousness) and (ii) demarcating a positive or negative quality of a stimulus. Affective responses occur rapidly and automatically—note how quickly you sense the feelings associated with the stimulus word “treasure” or the word “hate”. We argue that reliance on such feelings can be characterized as “the affect heuristic”. In this paper we trace the development of the affect heuristic across a variety of research paths followed by ourselves and many others. We also discuss some of the important practical implications resulting from ways that this heuristic impacts our daily lives.
It was shown recently by Cordoba, Faraco and Gancedo that the 2D porous media
equation admits weak solutions with compact support in time. The proof, based
on the convex integration framework, uses ideas from the theory of laminates,
in particular T4 configurations. In this note we calculate the explicit
relaxation of IPM, thus avoiding T4 configurations. We then use this to
construct weak solutions to the unstable interface problem (the Muskat
problem), as a byproduct shedding new light on the gradient flow approach
introduced by Otto.
We show that a general class of active scalar equations, including porous media and certain magnetostrophic turbulence models, admit non-unique weak solutions in the class of bounded functions. The proof is based upon the method of convex integration recently implemented for equations of fluid dynamics in [2,3]. Comment: 19 pages
We define mental contamination as the process whereby a person has an unwanted response because of mental processing that is unconscious or uncontrollable. This type of bias is distinguishable from the failure to know or apply normative rules of inference and can be further divided into the unwanted consequences of automatic processing and source confusion, which is the confusion of 2 or more causes of a response. Mental contamination is difficult to avoid because it results from both fundamental properties of human cognition (e.g., a lack of awareness of mental processes) and faulty lay beliefs about the mind (e.g., incorrect theories about mental biases). People's lay beliefs determine the steps they take (or fail to take) to correct their judgments and thus are an important but neglected source of biased responses. Strategies for avoiding contamination, such as controlling one's exposure to biasing information, are discussed.
Cognitive-experiential self-theory integrates the cognitive and the psychodynamic unconscious by assuming the existence of two parallel, interacting modes of information processing: a rational system and an emotionally driven experiential system. Support for the theory is provided by the convergence of a wide variety of theoretical positions on two similar processing modes; by real-life phenomena--such as conflicts between the heart and the head; the appeal of concrete, imagistic, and narrative representations; superstitious thinking; and the ubiquity of religion throughout recorded history--and by laboratory research, including the prediction of new phenomena in heuristic reasoning.
Although it has been claimed that people care more about identifiable than statistical victims, demonstrating this "identifiable victim effect" has proven difficult because identification usually provides information about a victim, and people may respond to the information rather than to identification per se. We show that a very weak form of identifiability--determining the victim without providing any personalizing information--increases caring. In the first, laboratory study, subjects were more willing to compensate others who lost money when the losers had already been determined than when they were about to be. In the second, field study, people contributed more to a charity when their contributions would benefit a family that had already been selected from a list than when told that the family would be selected from the same list. Copyright 2003 by Kluwer Academic Publishers
Subjects were less willing to pay for government medical insurance for diseases when the number of people who could not be cured was higher, holding constant the number who could be cured. In a second experiment, willingness to pay (from a hypothetical government windfall) for risk reduction was unaffected by whether the risk was described in terms of percentage or number of lives saved, even though subjects knew that the risks in question differed in prevalence. These results are consistent with the findings of Fetherstonhaugh et al., Jenni and Loewenstein, and others. I suggest that these results can be explained in terms of a general tendency to confuse proportions and differences, a confusion that is analogous to other confusions of quantitative dimensions in children, adults, the news media, and perhaps even the epidemiological literature.
Copyright 1997 by Kluwer Academic Publishers
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
Every dog has its day—but at what price? The Register Guard, Reflective and impulsive determi-nants of social behavior
- J Song
- a
- F Strack
- R Deutsch
Song, J. (2002, April 26). Every dog has its day—but at what price? The Register Guard, 15A. Strack, F., & Deutsch, R. (2004). Reflective and impulsive determi-nants of social behavior. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 8(3), 220–247.
Every dog has its day-but at what price? The Register Guard
- J Song
Song, J. (2002, April 26). Every dog has its day—but at what price?
The Register Guard, 15A.
The affect heuristic Heuristics and biases: The psychology of intuitive judgment
- P Slovic
- M Finucane
- E R Peters
- D G Macgregor
Slovic, P., Finucane, M., Peters, E. R., & MacGregor, D. G. (2002).
The affect heuristic. In T. Gilovich, D. Griffin, & D. Kahneman
(Eds.), Heuristics and biases: The psychology of intuitive judgment
(pp. 397–420). New York: Cambridge University Press.