EXPLAINING THE IDENTIFIABLE VICTIM EFFECT

It is widely believed that people are willing to expend greater resour ces to save the lives of identified victims than to save equal numbers of unidentified or statistical victims. There are many possible cause s of this disparity which have nor been enumerated previously or reste d empirically. We discuss four possible causes of the ''identifiable v ictim effect'' and present the results of two studies which indicate t hat the most important cause of the disparity in treatment of identifi able and statistical lives is that, for identifiable victims, a high p roportion of those at risk can be saved.