An examination of jury verdicts over the past decade involving people charged for exposing others to toxic substances, has revealed that the more victims are involved in a case, the less harshly the perpetrator of the crime is penalized.

The study, which also included two experiments in the lab, is the first to show that the bias toward feeling empathy for a single individual versus many – known as the identifiable victim bias – causes people to make judgments based on emotion that are disproportionate to the severity of a crime.

"The inspiration for the study was the observation that we tend to focus an extraordinary amount of attention and resources to crimes that have a really small number of victims, and have a harder time remaining engaged to larger scale kinds of crime," said psychologist Loran Nordgren of Northwestern University, lead author of the paper Aug. 25 in Social Psychological and Personality Science (.pdf).

The bias, which the researchers named the scope-severity paradox, has implications for a wide variety of fields, including the politics and media coverage of large-scale issues such as climate change or mass genocide.

"It fits well with a line of research that shows that as the number of people who are victims of some problem – whether it’s a crime or a famine – the responsiveness to it, and the likelihood of taking action to reduce the problem, decreases," said psychologist Paul Slovic of the University of Oregon, who was not involved in the study.

It has to do with the way empathy works, Slovic said. People empathize with people by putting themselves in the other person's shoes. The more shoes there are, the harder it is to empathize with any single individual. People don't multiply their feelings of empathy by the number of people involved.

The study tested whether the identifiable victim bias applies to the severity of punishment given in a series of three experiments. In the first experiment, participants were asked to read a story about a financial adviser who defrauded his clients. Half the participants read a story where only two or three people were harmed, and the other half read a story where dozens of people were harmed.

When asked to evaluate the severity of the crime and recommend a punishment, the fictional financial adviser who defrauded just a few people was judged more harshly than the one who defrauded many.

In the second experiment, participants were asked to read a story about a food processing company that sold tainted food and made people sick. The first group were given a basic description of the victims, and the second group received a photo of one of the victims along with her name and occupation. Participants given the photo judged the food processing company more harshly.

"When we made one individual identifiable, what that did was that it only partially corrected the effect," Nordgren said. "There was no case where we were able to get people to punish more for harming more."

The researchers also examined 133 jury cases between 2000 and 2009 involving exposure to toxic chemicals. They found as the number of people that were effected by the toxic chemicals increased, the amount of total damages the person responsible was asked to pay decreased.

"The study is an exceptionally elegant package because it has a demonstration of the phenomenon in the lab, in the field, and gives you a remedy," said economist George Loewenstein of Carnegie Mellon University, who did the original studies on the identifiable victim effect.

"The sky level picture is that even though our emotions provide the impetus for empathetic behavior, they provide a very poor guide to when we should be generous and how generous we should be, or when we should be punitive and how punitive we should be," Loewenstein said.

There are a some exceptions to the study, Nordgren said. If a case is extraordinarily different than cases that have come before or on a different scale, it doesn't follow the same rules.

For his next project, Nordgren is interested in looking at how identifiability of the perpetrators affects their punishment. He guesses that if the perpetrator of the crime is less identifiable, like an unbranded company versus a well known one, people will be less likely to care about the crimes committed.

Image: Flickr/Rainforest Action Network.

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