Request for help: I’m looking for a study on scope insensitivity to use in one of my college entrance essays. If I recall it correctly, the study showed something like, when asked how much people would pay save one girl of a group of eight in a tribe from a disease, it was over double what people would pay to save all eight.
I checked the standard scope insensitivity post, and tried my google-fu, but can’t remember where I originally heard it.
Other recent research shows similar results. Two Israeli psychologists asked people to contribute to a costly life-saving treatment. They could offer that contribution to a group of eight sick children, or to an individual child selected from the group. The target amount needed to save the child (or children) was the same in both cases. Contributions to individual group members far outweighed the contributions to the entire group.
Request for help: I’m looking for a study on scope insensitivity to use in one of my college entrance essays. If I recall it correctly, the study showed something like, when asked how much people would pay save one girl of a group of eight in a tribe from a disease, it was over double what people would pay to save all eight.
I checked the standard scope insensitivity post, and tried my google-fu, but can’t remember where I originally heard it.
The one you refer to was mentioned in http://lesswrong.com/lw/n9/the_intuitions_behind_utilitarianism/:
Link is dead, but the article is here http://foreignpolicy.com/2007/03/13/numbed-by-numbers/.
The original study seems to be Kogut and Ritov, 2005. I found a pdf through Google scholar search (always a good way to find studies) over here.
Thank you very much :-)