Talk:Identifiable victim effect

certainty effect
I ended up mostly rewriting this section, which is now called "identified vs statistical victims". I removed discussion of Kahneman and Tversky's excellent research because it is very general and not specific to the topic of this article. I retained the sentence on the Jenni and Loewenstein article. I added a citation to a study by Small, Loewenstein, and Slovic. Thiesen (talk) 19:53, 6 February 2023 (UTC)

Unless somebody complains, I will eventually delete the section titled "Certainty effect, risk-seeking for losses and loss aversion".

The section is based on a 1997 paper by Jenni and Loewenstein suggesting that what they call the "certainty effect" is a partial explanation of the identifiable victim effect. I don't know of any evidence supporting that hypothesis.

In the 1997 paper, none of the four experiments that test the certainty effect involve identified victims. All of the victims are unidentified. One of the four experiments finds statistically significant evidence of the certainty effect, but it does not link the certainty effect to the identifiable victim effect.

More recent papers that I have seen do not suggest the certainty effect as an explanation of the identifiable victim effect.

The 1997 paper is valuable for other reasons, including its discussions of vividness, relative size of the reference group, and ex post versus ex ante evaluation. Thiesen (talk) 06:13, 31 January 2023 (UTC)