The term "identified victim effect" refers to people's greater willingness to help identified victims (victims about whom they have some information) relative to unidentified persons. Past research suggests that the effect is restricted to single victims; meaning that identifying a single victim (by adding a name or a picture) increases helping, while the identification of individual members of a group has less effect on helping. This project explores the roots of the preference for helping a single, identifiable person, examining the development of this preference in young children within individualistic and collectivist societies. Hence the research intends to offer some insight into a most important facet of human social behavior: the willingness to help others in need. It aims to make significant theoretical contributions to understanding the sources of the identifiable victim effect and to the literature on the development of pro-social behavior.
The research team is conducting nine experiments. Some examine young children?s willingness to help identifiable single and group targets experiencing the same need to help clarify whether the identifiable victim effect develops with age and if so, when, in childhood, this tendency begins to appear. The research addresses the question of whether society can impart the feelings that are needed for enhancing caring for groups of people in need. In addition, the research explores whether the preference for helping the single identifiable victim may be a result of culture and education. Specifically, Western societies' individualism (according to which the individual person is the purpose for which society exists) may enhance people's caring for the one victim and cause the lack of relatedness to the group. If that is the case, it is expected that people in societies that hold more collectivistic views (emphasizing the primacy of the group or community rather than each individual person) will show no such preference.
In addition to its theoretical contribution, the proposed research has important practical implications for increasing the frequency and strength of pro-social behavior as part of optimal human development.
