Identifiable Victim Effect
(reading time – 30 sec.)

The identifiable victim effect describes the likelihood that we feel greater empathy, and an urge to help, in situations where tragedies are about a specific, identifiable individual, compared to situations where the victims are a larger, vaguer group of people.

Joseph Stalin, the former Premier of the Soviet Union, is often attributed to have introduced the idea of the identifiable victim effect when he made the statement:

“A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.”

Topic: #CognitiveBiases
Source: thedecisionlab.com