Your conclusion matches your data, but the data is suspiciously focused on charity. Is scope neglect easier to elicit in such contexts? Other explanations include it being hard to make large numbers relevant, and lack of imagination by researchers.

Douglas, I understand that scope insensitivity decreases substantially, but does not go away entirely, when personal profits are at stake.

It's not easy to devise experiments that distinguish unambiguously between the explanations that center around prototype-dominated affect, versus the warm glow of moral satisfaction. It seems pretty likely that both effects are at work.

How do people react if told "Here is a fixed amount of cash, that must go to charity. How do you wish it to be spent?"

Might that not distinguish "purchase of moral satisfaction" from "scope neglect"?

I strongly favor the "warm glow" explanation, but I'd take it a step further.

For most people, the warm glow is only worth it if they get social credit.

Those yellow LiveStrong bracelets are a great example. They're about $1 or so, and purchasers wear them around all day advertising that they care about cancer. How many of those people would have donated an equivalent amount (just a buck) without the badge of caring they get to wear around?

Those yellow LiveStrong bracelets are a great example. They're about $1 or so, and purchasers wear them around all day advertising that they care about cancer. How many of those people would have donated an equivalent amount (just a buck) without the badge of caring they get to wear around?

Actually, in my experience it's the other way round - people feel they're doing their bit just by wearing the bracelets, so they'll pay less for a bracelet than they'd donate anonymously.

But like most anecdotes, that one story doesn't tell you anything - we need statistics if we want to truly know how people behave.

how many lives an action saves is less important than the emotional connotations of the act which takes the lives. take micronutrient dispersal programs vs terrorism. malnutrition kills orders of magnitude more people and yet far more money is spent on terrorist prevention (well, mostly terrorist prevention signaling, but that's another topic). This is because fighting terrorism is more exciting than fighting scurvy. The order of magnitude difference in impact is ignored when evaluating which thing to spend money on. This makes choosing terrorism easier as saving 100 people from terrorism is much better for public relations than saving 100 random kids with goiters.

I came across an interesting book that includes the topic of scope insensitivity: "Determining the value of non-marketed goods: economics, psychological, and policy relevant aspects of contingent valuation methods" by Raymond J. Kopp, Werner W. Pommerehne, Norbert Schwarz. They suggest that while scope insensitivity on surveys is possible, it is not inevitable.

After providing an impressive list of studies rejecting the insensitivity hypothesis, they highlight two in particular: "First, the scope insensitivity hypothesis is strongly rejected ... (read more)

The world of business tends to emphasize pattern over particular. But intellectual aspects of pattern prevents people from caring.

So the marketer would win by using the sad and more concrete image of the oily bird, persuading more people by means of the Ludic fallacy.

Once upon a time, three groups of subjects were asked how much they would pay to save 2000 / 20000 / 200000 migrating birds from drowning in uncovered oil ponds. The groups respectively answered $80, $78, and $88 [1]. This is scope insensitivity or scope neglect: the number of birds saved - the scope of the altruistic action - had little effect on willingness to pay.

An alternate interpretation is that people conceptualize the problem not in terms of absolute number of birds saved, but in terms of the fraction of birds saved. And they have no idea how many migrating birds there are. Presenting the number 2000, or 200,000, probably suggests to them that that's on the order of how many migrating birds there are.

Keyword connection for literature searches: Loss Aversion

Jonah Lehrer has blogged recently about what he described as loss aversion -- doctors will take more risks if the same problem is framed as reducing loss of life rather than saving lives.

He summarizes some of the same papers mentioned in the post and also a new Feb 2010 PNAS paper, "Amygdala damage eliminates monetary loss aversion".

The ideas overlap with those in Circular Altruism, I'm not sure which post I originally meant to make this comment under.

This may be nitpicky but I found an errata in the references. [3] I believe should be 1993 instead of 1995.

That said, there are 3 broken links for me - [4], [6] and [7] - and the non-broken links don't seem to currently be providing full text access. So, here's an updated references table, with links to full text access in each except for the book in [3] which has an amazon link instead:

[1] Desvousges, W. Johnson, R. Dunford, R. Boyle, K. J. Hudson, S. and Wilson K. N. (1992). Measuring non-use damages using contingent valuation: experimental evaluation ac... (read more)

The uncertainty in how many people would be saved anyway without intervention is (as an absolute number, not a percentage) much larger for the 250000 people case. If someone claims to save 4500 people, and the uncertainty is greater than 4500, I may be skeptical that they can save anyone at all.

Imagine it as medical trials instead. If I claim I can cure 4500 out of 250000 people it may be that I can't cure anyone at all and I'm just counting the spontaneous remissions as "cures". If I claim I can cure 4500 out of 11000 people, it's very unlikely that they would have all recovered spontaneously.

I have a question. (I’m not questioning the scope insensitivity though, well, kinda)

Let’s just say people would pay the same amount for 2000,20000,and 200000 birds saved. But wouldn’t 200000 birds cause a bigger reaction in the society so that more people would pay?

Let’s say there are 1000 people paying for 2000 birds (each 80 dollars). But 20000 would raise a stronger attention which leads to 10000 people willing to pay, same for 200000 birds saved.

I think. It also might be somehow related to the bystander effect, as people generally believe if there’s 20... (read more)

Could one way of thinking about this, be that, decisions for loss aversion in the nth being from oneself, get less and less sensitive as our degrees of separation increase? My example would be the indiscriminate termination of the indigenous tribes of the Americas, on its 'discovery'.

I ran across a work of fiction that proposed an interesting hypothesis as to why we have some of this programming:

If you're a primitive tribesman, and something wipes out half your kin in a single incident, that's probably not something you can pick up your spear and hope to fight with any effectiveness.  But if it gets just one or two, that might be something you can take on and win.  And so as numbers grow larger we tend to grow numb to it and prefer avoidance over confrontation as a survival strategy.

I find the remark about the exponential increase in scope inducing a linear increase in willingness-to-pay perhaps being due to the number of zeroes quite amusing, and it leads me to speculate how a different base numbering system would change the willingness-to-pay. 

I predict that given identical proficiency in any base b numbering system, a base-2 numbering system would decrease willingness-to-pay for an identical exponential increase in scope, and a base-16 numbering system would increase it, as a result of the shorter length representations!

I imme... (read more)

I suppose in a world where people have limited time and have other priorities, we often glaze over the numbers and don't think about what they really mean in terms of magnitude. I also think desensitization due to the mass media has something to do with it -- we are shown statistics and huge numbers all them time for scenarios much worse (war deaths, crimes, disease deaths), so a number as large as 200,000 birds saved wouldn't make anyone bat an eye -- it just becomes another number in the book.

My suggestion for alternative explanation is that people somehow assume that for saving more birds, more people will be asked to donate, so after dividing, the amounts per person will be very similar.

When donating, people think of their capacity. A person's capacity is obviously limited. There is only a finite amount of money a person can have.

When people answer that they would pay $78, they only expect to save like 10 birds, but not all birds. It is already the limit of their capacity for those birds. However many birds in danger, they can only expect to save 10 birds and the rest, if they are not personally witnessing it, they can only leave them to die.

Now, say if your organisation saving these birds is in possession of a time machine and they could... (read more)

I call BS. There is an opportunity cost for passing up a chance to help some seabirds. Most people don't go through a given day being presented with lots of opportunities to save different numbers of seabirds. If they were, they'd do the math. Most people wouldn't assume that there were a dozen different seabird charities who are all pledging to help different numbers of seabirds because that's not the world we live in. If it was, people would process this differently. When people are presented with options, such as in stores where different brands compete for shelf space, they do tend to do the math

There maybe a much simpler explanation for seeming scope "insensitivity" in saturation. The differences in the lead example with the birds seems random variation to me. Probably most participants had some maximum amount they would ever consider parting with for non personal life threatening scenarios, and it doesn't take very many birds in the scenarios to reach their maximums. Seems like modeling artificially contrived scenarios like this is overthinking the issue without giving adequate thought to alternative more likely explanations.

Might this imply fault insensitivity too? For any given behavior "B" for every continued repeat of that behavior resulting in an impact "i-0" through "i-x", humans are only willing to curtail that behavior to a point despite the increasing impact of future actions? 

This very much reminds me of the quote attributed to Stalin:
"One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic"

I find solace that while many fellow citizens do not invest much time in educating themselves, a few insights have gained recognition through often famous (or infamous) quotes and little nuggets of advice. 

Prototypes possess inherent limitations in terms of their physical attributes. Nevertheless, one can attain a sense of moral fulfillment by conceiving an improved version of oneself, which represents a non-physical characteristic of a superior self-prototype. It remains uncertain whether non-physical attributes, such as an enhanced version of oneself, share the same upper boundaries as physical qualities, like a specific number of birds. Consequently, does scope neglect genuinely occur if the scope in question influences a non-physical aspect of a prototype? Is the scalability of a prototype restricted when the scope impacts a non-physical characteristic?

The usual finding is that exponential increases in scope create linear increases in willingness-to-pay

interesting

I wonder whether a cost judgement plays a part in these examples. Saving 2000 birds will have low effort cost and the risk of failure is less significant - trending towards 'there's nothing to lose'. Meanwhile, and attempt to save 200,000 birds (on its face) appears to entail a higher effort costs and the repercussions of failure would be more severe. Where faced with a situation where the default state is a negative outcome, people are often reluctant to invest their resources. 

I understand action wise, it might be good collectively; but I also understand for victims of certain crimes for example, it is very hard to tell them hey what you feel about the crime is not rational, and please donate to something else

Fun fact for those reading this in the far future, when Eliezer said "effective altruist" in this piece, he most likely was using the literal meaning, not referring to the EA movement, as that name hadn't been coined yet.

I think there is also a logical fallacy in that, when people donate they are not really focused on how their donation "would" affect the final outcome. Instead, people are thinking about how much they "could" donate. Personally speaking, when I donate, I'm confident that my donation couldn't save the whole pack, I'm just content with just helping out one of them, if possible.

I think it's not that the scale of the flock didn't matter to me, but if you spell it out how much it would take to rescue "one of" the people or animal in need, people would definitely donate differently.

It isn't clear to me whether the people surveyed were asked how much money they themselves would spend versus they as a state would spend.