Scope insensitivity
Also known as: Scope neglect
Our feelings and willingness to pay barely scale with the size of a problem.
What it means
Scope insensitivity is the finding that people's emotional response to a problem, and their stated willingness to pay to address it, are largely insensitive to its magnitude — helping 2,000 victims and 200,000 victims evokes roughly similar feeling and similar donations. The mechanism is that valuation is driven by affect rather than arithmetic: a problem is represented by a single, vivid prototype (one suffering individual, one oiled bird) whose emotional impact does not multiply with the number of cases, a phenomenon Kahneman described as 'valuation by prototype.' Because the mental image that carries the feeling stays roughly constant regardless of scale, the resulting willingness to pay is nearly flat across enormous differences in stakes. It is closely linked to the identifiable-victim effect and to compassion fade, in which adding victims can actually reduce the emotional pull, and it poses a deep challenge to rational, cost-effective allocation of charitable and policy resources. It matters because it means our generosity tracks the vividness of a cause rather than the amount of good done, which can steer help away from where it would help most.
Examples
Stated willingness to pay to save 2,000, 20,000, or 200,000 birds from oil ponds was found to be roughly the same regardless of the number.
Reading that a fire killed six people moves you about as much as reading that a flood killed six hundred — the feeling latches onto one imagined face, and doesn't multiply.
A safety upgrade preventing ten deaths a year and one preventing a thousand draw similar public pressure; either way, the picture in the paper is of a single grieving family.
First described in Desvousges et al.; Kahneman & Knetsch.