Most people are caring and will exert great effort to rescue individual victims whose needy plight comes to their attention. These same good people, however, often become numbly indifferent to the plight of individuals who ...

Traditionally, the principal focus of research on judgment and decision making has been largely cognitive and rationalistic. More recently, however, decision-making researchers have acknowledged the role of non-cognitive ...

Recently Congress has been moving to enact legislation that enhances the role of risk analysis in policy-making. The various risk-benefit analyses, risk comparisons, and risk characterizations mandated by the bills under ...

There is an increased willingness to help identified individuals rather than non-identified, and the effect of identifiability is mainly present when a single individual rather than a group is presented. However, identifiability ...

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 ...