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A critical question for government officials, managers of NGOs, and politicians is how to respond to situations in which large numbers of lives are at risk. Theories in judgment and decision making as well as economics suggest diminishing marginal utility with increasing quantities of goods. In the domain of lifesaving, this form of non-linearity implies decreasing concern for individual lives as the number of affected people increases. In this paper, we show how intuitive valuations based on prosocial emotions can lead to scope insensitivity and suboptimal responses to lives at risk. We present both normative and descriptive models of valuations of lives and discuss the underlying psychological processes as they relate to judgments and decisions made in public policy and by NGOs.

A critical question for government officials, managers of NGOs, and politicians is how to respond to situations in which large numbers of lives are at risk. Theories in judgment and decision making as well as economics suggest diminishing marginal utility with increasing quantities of goods. In the domain of lifesaving, this form of non-linearity implies decreasing concern for individual lives as the number of affected people increases. In this paper, we show how intuitive valuations based on prosocial emotions can lead to scope insensitivity and suboptimal responses to lives at risk. We present both normative and descriptive models of valuations of lives and discuss the underlying psychological processes as they relate to judgments and decisions made in public policy and by NGO5. (C) 2015 Published by Elsevier Inc on behalf of Society for Applied Research in Memory and Cognition. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

A critical question for government officials, managers of NGOs, and politicians is how to respond to situations in which large numbers of lives are at risk. Theories in judgment and decision making as well as economics suggest diminishing marginal utility with increasing quantities of goods. In the domain of lifesaving, this form of non-linearity implies decreasing concern for individual lives as the number of affected people increases. In this paper, we show how intuitive valuations based on prosocial emotions can lead to scope insensitivity and suboptimal responses to lives at risk. We present both normative and descriptive models of valuations of lives and discuss the underlying psychological processes as they relate to judgments and decisions made in public policy and by NGOs.

ABSTRACTRoutines help individuals save decision effort and protect them from overreacting to volatile environments. Yet routines become dysfunctional if the environment changes fundamentally. Whether the environment has truly changed is often not easy to tell. We experimentally study adaptation to a change in a previously stable environment. Participants have to choose between one of the four decks of cards. Each deck represents a lottery, with a distribution of gains and losses initially unknown to participants. In the learning phase of the experiment, participants acquire the routine to choose the most attractive deck. Unbeknownst to participants, after an interruption, the lotteries represented by the competing decks are changed. We study how participants react to this change. We manipulate whether participants have access to choices by a confederate who most of the time makes the normative choice. In baseline condition, they never do. In the treatments, access is provided either during the learning phase, during the test phase, or during both phases. Participants are most likely to realize that the world has changed if they had access to the confederate's choices in both phases. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.