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....

When making many choices, a person can broadly bracket them by assessing the consequences of all of them taken together. or narrowly bracket them by making each choice in isolation. We integrate research conducted in a wide range of decision contexts which shows that choice bracketing is an...

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...

This article examines how public concern about different social problems changes over time in response to fluctuations in problem severity. Examining time series of concern and objective severity for nine different problems, both graphically and econometrically, we address three main questions....