An effort was made to construct two structurally similar risk-taking tasks in order to evaluate inter-task consistency of individual differences. Only the mode of response differed between tasks. In one task, subjects chose ...

This paper describes a psychological phenomenon called psychic numbing that devalues lives when many are at stake and thus enables political leaders to neglect mass suffering, in violation of our professed humanitarian ...

A fundamental principle of psychophysics is that people's ability to discriminate change in a physical stimulus diminishes as the magnitude of the stimulus increases. We find that people also exhibit diminished sensitivity ...

This study is a replication and extension in Canada of a previous study in the United States in which toxicologists and members of the public were surveyed to determine their attitudes, beliefs, and perceptions regarding ...

A series of experiments studied how people judge the frequency of death from various causes. The judgments exhibited a highly consistent but systematically biased subjective scale of frequency. Two kinds of bias were ...

Similar to cigarette smoking, consumption of cigars delivers nicotine and byproducts of tobacco combustion and elevates the risk of addiction, illness, and premature death. This study examined the relationship of affect, ...

In 1994 I carefully followed the reports of the genocide occurring in Rwanda where some 800,000 people were murdered in about 100 days. I was shocked by the indifference of the American public to this terrible news and ...

Why does public conflict over societal risks persist in the face of compelling and widely accessible scientific evidence? We conducted an experiment to probe two alternative answers: the “Science Comprehension Thesis” ...

The “identifiable victim effect” refers to peoples’ tendency to preferentially give to identified versus anonymous victims of misfortune, and has been proposed to partly depend on affect. By soliciting charitable donations ...