JOBNAME: Kluwer Journals − RI PAGE: 1 SESS: 34 OUTPUT: Wed May 28 08:52:24 1997/data11/kluwer/journals/risk/v14n3art2Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, 14:235–257 (1997)© 1997 Kluwer Academic PublishersExplaining the “Identifiable Victim Effect”KAREN E. JENNIDepartment of Engineering and Public Policy, Carnegie Mellon UniversityGEORGE LOEWENSTEINDepartment of Social and Decision Sciences, Carnegie Mellon UniversityAbstractIt is widely believed that people are willing to expend greater resources to save the lives of identified victimsthan to save equal numbers of unidentified or statistical victims. There are many possible causes of this disparitywhich 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 causeof the disparity in treatment of identifiable and statistical lives is that, for identifiable victims, a high proportionof those at risk can be saved.Key words: value of life, identifiable victimsJEL Classification: J-17“There is a distinction between an individual life and a statistical life. Let a 6-year-oldgirl with brown hair need thousands of dollars for an operation that will prolong herlife until Christmas, and the post office will be swamped with nickels and dimes to saveher. But let it be reported that without a sales tax the hospital facilities of Massachu-setts will deteriorate and cause a barely perceptible increase in preventable deaths—notmany will drop a tear or reach for their checkbooks.” (Schelling, 1968)“The death of a single Russion soldier is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic.”Joseph Stalin (quoted in Nisbett and Ross, 1980:43)In late 1987, eighteen-month old Jessica McClure spent 58 hours trapped in a well, andAmericans responded with sympathy, a tremendous rescue effort, and money. The Mc-Clures received over $700,000 in donations for “baby Jessica” in the months after herrescue, and eventually a popular television movie, “Everybody’s Baby: The Rescue ofJessica McClure,” was made about the incident (People Weekly, November 2, 1987; April16, 1990; Variety, May 31, 1989). At the time, there was no question but that everythingpossible should and would be done to rescue the child; cost was no object. If similarresources were spent on preventative health care for children, hundreds of lives could besaved. Yet it is difficult to raise money for efforts directed at saving such “statistical”victims.Kluwer Journal@ats-ss12/data11/kluwer/journals/risk/v14n3art2 COMPOSED: 03/25/97 10:14 am. PG.POS. 1 SESSION: 135% 50% 90% 100%JOBNAME: Kluwer Journals − RI PAGE: 2 SESS: 30 OUTPUT: Wed May 28 08:52:24 1997/data11/kluwer/journals/risk/v14n3art2The story of “baby Jessica” is simply one example of the “identifiable victim effect:”society is willing to spend far more money to save the lives of identifiable victims than tosave statistical victims. This has been remarked upon in treatises on public policy (Gore,1992), in scholarly works (Schelling, 1968; Calabresi and Bobbitt, 1978; Viscusi, 1992;Whipple, 1992), the medical literature (Redelmeier and Tversky, 1990) and the popularpress (Toufexis, 1993).The identifiable victim effect plays a role in many important policy issues. Recently, ithas received special prominence in the national debate over funding priorities for healthcare, where expensive measures are often taken for identified individuals, but funding forpreventative care seems to be lacking. For example, a recent effort to separate conjoinedtwins, whose probability of surviving the operation was estimated to be less than 1%, wasused in some media to highlight the discrepancies between extravagant health care fund-ing for “last-ditch efforts … to save the few” and modest funding for basic and preven-tative care that would benefit the many (Toufexis, 1993). In debates over the NorthAmerican Free Trade Agreement, opponents could identify specific individuals whowould lose their jobs if the agreement was approved, whereas proponents could refer onlyto the additional “statistical” jobs that would presumably result (Goodman, 1993). Iden-tifiable victims need not be human: in 1988 a multi-national effort spent millions to rescuethree grey whales trapped under the Arctic ice cap, while at the same time the Japanesewhaling industry was spending millions to locate and harvest whales (Linden, 1988).Identifiable victims seem to produce a greater empathic response, accompanied bygreater willingness to make personal sacrifices to provide aid. One might think, therefore,that the large literature on empathy, altruism, and helping behavior would provide cluesabout why identifiable victims are treated differently from statistical victims. However, theliterature on helping behavior focuses almost exclusively on the factors that cause peopleto aid identified victims (see, e.g., Latané and Darley, 1970, or Piliavin et al., 1981), andmuch of this literature looks at factors, such as the number of potential aiders and thecosts of providing aid, that are not obviously relevant to the problem of why identifiableand statistical victims are treated differently. Likewise, the literature on empathy andaltruism has been concerned primarily with the question of whether “true”—that is self-less—empathy actually exists (see, e.g., Cialdini et al., 1987, and Batson et al., 1991),which again seems to have little relevance to the question of why identifiable and statis-tical victims produce such a different response. We have not seen any explicit treatment ofthe identifiable victim effect in either literature.In those literatures where it has been discussed, the distinction between identifiable andstatistical victims is typically treated as a simple dichotomy, and the frequency with whichit is mentioned reinforces this view. However, the simplicity of the distinction is deceptive:in practice, there are several differences between identifiable and statistical victims, anyone of which could account for their differential treatment.Our goal in this paper is to gain a better understanding of the psychological underpin-nings of the identifiable victim effect. We do not attempt to explain the effect at a deeperlevel—e.g., to explain at an evolutionary level how or why humans have come to respondmore strongly to identifiable than to statistical victims. Based on discussions with