Harming more people is less bad than harming fewer...

...according to the folk, anyway. In a fascinating paper, Nordgren and McDonnell found that subjects judged that wrongful actions (defrauding people and knowingly selling poisoned food) were judged as less severe when they harmed 30 people than when they harmed 3. Subjects also judged that the perpetrators should get shorter sentences in the 30 people cases than in the 3. Nordgren and McDonnell suggest that the effect is due to our feeling greater sympathy for identifiable individuals than for abstract individuals. Sure enough, they found that subjects asked to describe victims in the small number cases produced a longer list of traits. They also found that increasing identification in the large number cases, by giving subjects a photo of one of the victims, partially eliminated the effect, inasmuch as subjects then judged the actions as equally severe in both conditions (this may not count as elimination, since one would think that we ought not to judge the actions as equally severe; we ought to judge actions harming more people as worse than actions harming fewer).

Nordgren and McDonnell also looked at damages awarded in actual cases like those they gave their subjects, and found that the effect seems to be at work in the real world: juries punish defendants less harshly when their actions harm more people than when they harm fewer.

H/T Ben Goldacre.

Comments

[Matt Hoberg]

One explanation for this result is that a large number of victims has more of an "impersonal" influence on our judgments, while a small number of victims might have more of a "personal" influence. (The personal/impersonal distinction is from Josh Greene.) This is probably why charitable organizations usually try to show images of the individuals they want to help, rather than just reporting statistics about how many are in need.

[Roman Altshuler]

I haven't looked at the experiment, but couldn't one suppose that (1) harming a small group of people and harming a large group of people generally involve different dispositions, and (2) the folk are responding to such presumed differences in the wrongdoer's character? Suppose, for example, that X defrauds three people. Well, since most of us tend to identify with small groups of victims, most of us might automatically assume that X also identified with them and yet ripped them off anyway. But if Y defrauded 30 or 300 people, he was likely not identifying with his victims. So maybe X is both callous and greedy, whereas Y is simply greedy. Thus, from an aretaic, though not from a consequentialist, perspective, X might be more blameworthy than Y.