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.