Scope insensitivity: the limits of intuitive valuation of human lives in public policy

Abstract

Researchers argue that donations towards humanitarian aid are not always proportional to the number of affected people. Emotional reactions may shift in the face of large victim numbers from empathy to compassion collapse. Compassion collapse is a swift breakdown of sympathetic responses and it accounts for scope insensitivity and suboptimal resource allocation. The valuation of life underlying humanitarian aid interventions may follow a psychophysical numbing model, where each life saved has less value than the previous life and more weight is given to saving a higher proportion of victims than a higher absolute number of lives. Deliberative thought processes should be deployed to reduce the impact of biases on the valuations of life. – AI-generated abstract.