The Identifiable Victim Bias

The epic drilling to save the trapped Chilean miners has begun:

The 31-ton drill made a shallow, preliminary test hole Tuesday in the solid rock it must bore through, the first step in the weeklong digging of a ''pilot hole'' to guide the way for the rescue. Later the drill will be outfitted with larger bits to gradually expand the hole and make it big enough so the men can be pulled out one by one.

Before rescuers dug small bore holes down to the miners' emergency shelter, the men survived 17 days without contact with the outside world by rationing a 48-hour supply of food and digging for water in the ground.

The miners have already survived underground longer than anyone else - they broke the 25 day record today - and will mostly like remain underground for at least another few months.

But this post is not about the miners, and their Dantesque plight. Instead, it's about our reaction to them, and the extraordinary outpouring of emotion that occurs whenever we can latch onto a set of identifiable victims. I wrote about the research of Paul Slovic in my book, How We Decide:

The experiment is simple: Slovic asks people how much they would be willing to donate to various charitable causes. For example, Slovic found that when people were shown a picture of a single starving child named Rokia in Mali, they acted with impressive generosity. After looking at Rokia's emaciated body and haunting brown eyes, they donated, on average, two dollars and fifty cents to Save the Children. However, when a second group of people were provided with a list of statistics about starvation throughout Africa⎯more than three million children in Malawi are malnourished, more than eleven million people in Ethiopia need immediate food assistance, etc.⎯the average donation was fifty percent lower. At first glance, this makes no sense. When we are informed about the true scope of the problem we should give more money, not less. Rokia's tragic story is just the tip of the iceberg.

According to Slovic, the problem with statistics is that they don't activate our moral emotions. The depressing numbers leave us cold: our mind can't comprehend suffering on such a massive scale. This is why we are riveted when one child falls down a well, but turn a blind eye to the millions of people who die every year for lack of clean water. Or why we donate thousands of dollars to help a single African war orphan featured on the cover of a magazine, but ignore widespread genocides in Rwanda or Darfur. As Mother Theresa put it, "If I look at the mass I will never act. If I look at the one, I will."

Of course, this is a deeply irrational reaction. We are much less interested in helping a victim - we only want to help *the *victim. (This bias is known as the identifiable victim effect, since it suggests that we react much more strongly when the victim can be specified.) Why do we this? Because human charity is ultimately rooted in our compassionate feelings, and not in some rational, utilitarian calculations. We are not Vulcans.

What's interesting, though, is that some people are much less vulnerable to the identifiable victim effect than others. (There are Spocks among us!) Consider this new paper led by James Friedrich, at Willamette University, which measured differences in "analytic processing" style among 120 undergraduates. (The test for this is a rather straightforward survey, which includes questions such as "I enjoy intellectual challenges" and "I believe in trusting my hunches".) Not surprisingly, people who tend toward analysis were also less likely to display the identifiable victim bias:

A field study tested recent claims that analytical processing might undermine support for identified victims by suppressing emotional responses. Individual differences in analytic (“rational”) processing style moderated the effects of different request types on donations to a Zambian relief fund. Less-analytic processors donated more to a single identified victim than to requests describing statistical victims or a combination of both; more-analytic processors showed no differences.

Just because the identifiable victim bias exists doesn't mean it's a mistake to move heaven and earth to save the miners. That impulse reflects one of the noblest human urges. But it does suggest that we should be more mindful of all the moments when we're not compassionate, when there are so many victims that no one can be identified. (As others have noted, the floods in Pakistan have received far less attention than warranted, in part because most of the stories focus on the vast scope of the disaster, and not on individual tragedies.) Our emotions might not understand such suffering, but the suffering goes on just the same. Auden said it best:

*About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it *takes *place
While someone else is eating *or opening a window or just walking dully along...