The More Victims, the Less Severe the Judgment

[Forkboy]

An examination of jury verdicts over the past decade involving people charged for exposing others to toxic substances, has revealed that the more victims are involved in a case, the less harshly the perpetrator of the crime is penalized.

The study, which also included two experiments in the lab, is the first to show that the bias toward feeling empathy for a single individual versus many — known as the identifiable victim bias — causes people to make judgments based on emotion that are disproportionate to the severity of a crime.

“The inspiration for the study was the observation that we tend to focus an extraordinary amount of attention and resources to crimes that have a really small number of victims, and have a harder time remaining engaged to larger scale kinds of crime,” said psychologist Loran Nordgren of Northwestern University, lead author of the paper Aug. 25 in Social Psychological and Personality Science (.pdf).

The bias, which the researchers named the scope-severity paradox, has implications for a wide variety of fields, including the politics and media coverage of large-scale issues such as climate change or mass genocide.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/09/scope-severity-paradox/

[dkf]

1. Could that be a psychological defense mechanism?

[Forkboy]

5. I think it may be for many, yes.

[McCamy Taylor]

2. Could be the lawyers, too. A class action suit gets them big money even if the

individual victims get very little. Since lawyers want to get paid and not wade through appeals, maybe they have an incentive to accept a smaller total judgment (which will not be appealed) in order to get their money fast.

[Hannah Bell]

3. which is why bush walks free.

[Fumesucker]

6. Ding, ding, ding.. We have a winner..

[Confusious]

4. As Stalin said

One death is a tragedy, a million a statistic.

[Edweird]

8. Yup. 1 murder gets you prison, 1,000,000 gets you invited to Geneva.

[pinboy3niner]

7. K&R