Identifiable Victim Effect

CORE DEFINITION

The identifiable victim effect was documented by Thomas Schelling and developed by Deborah Small, George Loewenstein, and Paul Slovic. Its core proposition is that a concrete, singular victim activates affective response, while statistical victims remain abstract and generate little emotion, so donations and policy attention skew toward individual cases regardless of scale. The key qualification is that the effect describes a bias, not a moral verdict: it does not mean individual cases deserve less, only that the response is driven by vividness rather than by the number of people affected.