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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.

AbstractHumanitarian crises like the Covid‐19 pandemic pose significant challenges to society, prompting scientific debate on whether such situations elicit more prosocial or more selfish behavior. Despite the restrictions imposed by the pandemic, current evidence indicates a continued display of various prosocial behaviors. This research aims to enhance the understanding of what constitutes prosocial behavior from both individuals' lay and scientific perspectives. For this purpose, we analyzed lay perspectives via an open question in a representative survey (N = 446) and qualitatively categorized the reported prosocial behaviors inductively with content analysis. The qualitative content analysis revealed three clusters of prosocial behaviors: promoting the welfare of others, health‐protective measures, and supporting society. Additionally, we conducted a systematic literature review to identify the scientific perspective view (i.e., focusing on the empirical measurements) on prosocial behaviors studied during the pandemic. Although behaviors promoting the welfare of others (e.g., donations) were the most commonly studied in the literature review, participants reported more health‐protective behavior, such as hand‐washing, which was not traditionally considered to be prosocial before the pandemic. The comparison between individuals' lay and scientific perspectives highlighted some prosocial behaviors that warrant future investigation (e.g., supporting the economy, home office).

Previous research from the United States suggests that having voted for a losing-side candidate in presidential elections is associated with individual feelings of exclusion and social pain, reactions usually observed in interpersonal or small-group instances of exclusion. The current research replicates these findings for voters of losing-side parties in a field study on a real election in a European country (Austria; Study 1), demonstrating that findings hold within a different political system. Moreover, we add experimental support for the causal effect of electoral loss on feelings of exclusion and social pain reactions in a two-party (Study 2) and a multiparty context (Study 3). We further extend previous research by demonstrating that postelectoral need-threat likely translates into behavioral intentions on a societal level (Studies 1–3). The current findings add to an emerging line of research on the importance of individual feelings of exclusion in politics by integrating small-group research with macropolitical behavior.

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.