The effect seems to be to create a sympathetic helpful mood in the watcher - by getting them to imagine the problem affecting their own daughter - and then switching the context to: helping a stranger in Africa. This sort of technique is often known as framing.
Of course, whether being manipulated into giving away your cash is a good thing or not seems to depend rather on your perspective.
I agree that the video engages in framing. The point is that framing is always present. The "(cue the skepticism)" segment of the video and people who say similar such things are also engaging in framing.
Sometimes the best way to overcome bias is through an emotional appeal. Below I interweave discussion of how emotional appeals can be used to overcome the bias corresponding to the identifiable victim effect and maladaptive resource hoarding instinct.
The beginning of the abstract to Paul Slovic's article "If I look at the mass I will never act”: Psychic numbing and genocide reads
Eliezer has discussed this and related topics extensively, for example in Scope Insensitivity. See also the references listed at wikipedia under identifiable victim effect. How can we go about overcoming this bias? One answer is "by keeping it in mind and by teaching people about it." But while some people have the intellectual interest and ability to learn about the identifiable victim effect, others don't. Moreover, it's not clear that being aware of this bias is by itself very useful in overcoming it.
But reason is not the only means of overcoming bias.
Before I proceed I should make some disclaimers:
Disclaimer #1: Below I discuss overcoming biases that people have against donating money for the purpose of improving health in the developing world. In doing so I am not advocating in favor of developing world aid over other forms of charity. The case of developing world aid simply provides a good example. Most people who decline to donate to charities that improve health in the developing world do not decline to do so because they think they have a better cause to donate to.
Disclaimer #2: This posting is intended to advocate the use of emotional appeals specifically for the purpose of overcoming bias. Obviously emotional appeals can and are frequently used to create bias - this is not what I'm advocating. I believe that the video which I discuss below does more to overcome bias than it does to create bias for the typical viewer
Disclaimer #3: The use of emotional appeals strikes some as patronizing or manipulative. I do not view them in this light when they are used for the sake of aligning people's behavior with their values for the sake of good causes. I subject myself to stimuli with emotional appeals in order to keep myself motivated to do what I think is right. The video below is one such example. Another such example is the paragraph of Eliezer's One Life Against The World which reads
Disclaimer #4: In referencing the topic of charitable donation, I'm not advocating that people encourage others to donate money to any cause to the point of becoming unhappy about it. A few months ago I wrote an article explaining my position on this matter here. I was interested to be reminded that Eliezer has made similar remarks in his video response to a question by komponisto.
The video titled The Life You Can Save in 3 Minutes does a great job of overcoming the absence of an identifiable victim effect without providing an identifiable victim and without explicitly mentioning the identifiable victim effect at all. The first 1:15 minutes make a case for the viewer donating money to save lives in the developing world. The text of the next segment of the video reads
In doing so the authors of the video are channeling a common reaction to appeals for developing world aid. It's rational for viewers to have the concerns mentioned above. As the video comments next:
Developing world aid is a very tricky business and a high level of vigilance is required to make sure that it goes well. But at the moment it appears to me that there's a bottom line that it's possible to greatly improve people's lives by donating money to certain charities working to save lives in the developing world. See GiveWell's International page for more information.
More to the point of this post, in practice there are problems of people:
I view these observed behaviors as being in line with Yvain's Conflicts Between Mental Subagents: Expanding Wei Dai's Master-Slave Model: it seems as though these lapses in reasoning arise from modules of our brain which were designed to allow us to preserve our self-image as a good person while declining to relinquish material resources. I agree with Yvain's Would Your Real Preferences Please Stand Up? posting that there's no meaningful sense in which such lapses in reasoning should be viewed as revealing our preferences.
As I say in Missed opportunities for doing well by doing good I suspect that:
So it looks highly desirable to help people overcome their irrational hoarding of material resources, overcome the psychic numbing attached to the absence of an identifiable victim, and see the relative costs and benefits of donating in clear terms. The creators of The Life You Can Save in 3 Minutes do a great job of this in the subsequent portion of the video. After the text "there are long answers to these tough questions" the video shifts into a different mood and the text reads:
This serves to dispel the absence of an identifiable victim and make the true benefits of donating (or equivalently, the true opportunity cost of not giving) psychologically salient. [Edit: At least sometimes, but see byrnema's comment and my response.] A portion of the remainder of the video makes low cost of giving to the donor psychologically salient. Key to the video's effectiveness is its use of music and visual imagery. The video is well worth viewing in entirety.
As I said above, sometimes the best way to overcome bias is through an emotional appeal. This is especially so when communicating with neurotypical people whose minds are naturally drawn toward emotional detail rather than logical detail.
Members of the Less Wrong community who are interested in this topic might find it useful to study the research of Deborah Small.