[2] The conceptualization of the identifiable victim effect as it is known today is commonly attributed to American economist Thomas Schelling.
He wrote that harm to a particular person invokes “anxiety and sentiment, guilt and awe, responsibility and religion, [but]…most of this awesomeness disappears when we deal with statistical death”.
[3] Historical figures from Joseph Stalin to Mother Teresa are credited with statements that epitomize the identifiable victim effect.
The conviction of Rosa Parks in 1955 for refusing to give up her bus seat in favor of a White passenger inspired the Black community to boycott the Montgomery, Alabama buses for over a year.
Even after Jessica was discharged from the hospital, the McClure family was flooded with cards and gifts from members of the public as well as a visit from then-Vice President George H.W.
[7] In September, 2015, three-year-old Syrian refugee Alan (or Aylan) Kurdi drowned when he and his family tried to reach Europe by boat.
In an experiment more recent than the meta-analysis, identifying a victim in COVID-19 messaging had no meaningful effect on pro-health behaviors such as hand-washing, mask-wearing, and staying at home.
In 2003, Deborah Small and George Loewenstein conducted an experiment showing that the identifiable victim effect does not result from vividness alone.
[25] Most research dedicated to the identifiable victim effect avoids the topic of blame, using explicitly blameless individuals, such as children suffering from an illness.
[25] This reduction in help is even more pronounced if the individual believes in the just world fallacy, which is the tendency for people to blame the victim for what has happened to them.
This supports the idea that altruistic acts may serve as coping mechanisms to alleviate negative emotions, such as distress or guilt.
Jenni and Loewenstein's[1] experimental subjects showed significantly more support for risk-reducing actions when a higher proportion of the reference group was at risk.
[17] For example, Small, Loewenstein, and Slovic[33] found that subjects donated much more money to help a single starving girl named Rokia than to relieve a famine described statistically.
The identifiable victim effect is a special case of a more general phenomenon: people respond to stories more readily than to facts.
This effect is not limited to medical professionals, as laymen demonstrate this same bias towards providing more expensive treatments for individual patients.
[40] James S. Brady, the then-White House press secretary, was among three collateral damage victims in the attempted assassination of President Reagan in 1981.
Brady was explicitly named in reports of the shooting in contrast to the other two injured, a District of Columbia police officer and a Secret Service agent.
Following his death in 1990, the US Congress passed the Ryan White Care Act, which funded the largest set of services for people living with AIDS in the country.
[42] In November 2005, the U.S. Congress stripped $50 million from a bill that would have funded peacekeeping efforts in Darfur, where genocide was claiming hundreds of thousands of lives.
Her casket had lain in state at the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol, and many elected officials, including President George W. Bush, had attended her memorial service.
Genocide expert Paul Slovic wrote, "We appropriately honor the one, Rosa Parks, but by turning away from the crisis in Darfur we are, implicitly, placing almost no value on the lives of millions there.
"[5] Republican politician George Santos was elected to Congress in a formerly Democratic district after falsely claiming that his mother was a 9/11 casualty and his maternal grandparents were Jewish Holocaust refugees who had fled Soviet Ukraine and German-occupied Belgium.
[2] Jurors, when deliberating, work with an identifiable alleged perpetrator, and thus may attach negative emotions (e.g. disgust, anger) to the individual or assign increased blame when handing down a harsh sentence.
On the other extreme, jurors may feel sympathy, relating with the perpetrator on a level not experienced by policymakers, leading to a milder verdict than legally appropriate or allowable.
When identities of suspects are revealed through description of their features or release of their images, media coverage and public discussion on the issue grows.
They hypothesized that because of increasing corporate size, the ubiquity of e-commerce, and the commoditization of workers, business executives are less likely to know their employees, customers, and shareholders, and therefore they might be more willing to exploit these unidentified potential victims.
Although anxiously attached people may participate in prosocial behaviors, such as donating money to a charity, researchers hypothesize that their actions are not the result of altruistic tendencies, but instead are "positively correlated with egoistic, rather than altruistic motives for helping and volunteering,"[48]: 652 and that anxiously attached people engage in pro-social behavior mainly when strenuous effort is not required.
The experimenters did not test whether people who are more prone to feelings of guilt experience the identified victim effect more intensely.
Researchers theorize that these differences result because experiential thinkers rely on emotional responses towards an issue when making a decision.