A critical question for government officials, managers of NGOs, and politicians is how to respond to situations in which large numbers of lives are at risk. Theories in judgment and decision making as well as economics suggest diminishing marginal utility with increasing quantities of goods. In the domain of lifesaving, this form of non-linearity implies decreasing concern for individual lives as the number of affected people increases. In this paper, we show how intuitive valuations based on prosocial emotions can lead to scope insensitivity and suboptimal responses to lives at risk. We present both normative and descriptive models of valuations of lives and discuss the underlying psychological processes as they relate to judgments and decisions made in public policy and by NGOs.

A study was conducted to examine if people’s sensitivity to the magnitude to which somebody helps depends on how the help is framed. To test this, participants read vignettes about moral agents whose help had one of three different magnitudes: a base level, a medium level (the base level times 5) and a high level (the base level times 10). The moral agents’ help was also framed in one of three ways. They either helped victims, volunteered a number of hours, or donated an amount to charity. To measure the sensitivity, participants rated how likeable they found the agent. It turned out that if the help was framed as helping victims, the participants were not at all sensitive to the different magnitudes of help. That is, an agent was not liked more if they helped a high or medium number of victims than if they helped a low number; neither were they liked more if they helped a high number than if they helped a medium number. However, in the two other types of framing, participants were more sensitive. When help was framed as volunteering a number of hours, participants liked an agent more if they volunteered a medium or high number of hours than if they only volunteered a low number of hours. But they did not like a participant more if they volunteered a high number of hours than if they volunteered a medium number of hours. The same exact pattern was found when framing help as donating to charity. A possible explanation for the result is given in the discussion.