A Sorrow Shared Is a Sorrow Halved: Moral Judgments of Harm to Single versus Multiple Victims.

Daffie Konis,Uriel Haran,Shahar Ayal,Kelly Saporta

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01142

Abstract

We describe a bias in moral judgment in which the mere existence of other victims reduces assessments of the harm suffered by each harmed individual. Three experiments support the seemingly paradoxical relationship between the number of harmed individuals and the perceived severity of the harming act. In Experiment 1a, participants expressed lower punitive intentions toward a perpetrator of an unethical act that hurt multiple people and assigned lower monetary compensation to each victim than did those who judged a similar act that harmed only one person. In Experiment 1b, participants displayed greater emotional involvement in the case of a single victim than when there were multiple victims, regardless of whether the victims were unrelated and unaware of each other or constituted a group. Experiment 2 measured the responses of the victims themselves. Participants received false performance feedback on a task before being informed that they had been deceived. Victims who were deceived alone reported more negative feelings and judged the deception as more immoral than did those who knew that others had been deceived as well. Taken together, these results suggest that a victim’s plight is perceived as less severe when others share it, and this bias is common to both third-party judges and victims.

Highlights

The CNBC television series CNBC’s “American Greed” (2007) tells the story of Barry Hunt who solicited money from several people across the United States by presenting them with phony investment opportunities and promising them high returns only to disappear with their savings
We conducted a one-way ANOVA to measure the effect of the total number of victims on participants’ estimates of the lowest sufficient compensation for an individual victim
No significant difference was found between the two multiple victim conditions [t(124) = −1.37, p = 0.17, d = −0.24]

Summary

Introduction

The CNBC television series CNBC’s “American Greed” (2007) tells the story of Barry Hunt who solicited money from several people across the United States by presenting them with phony investment opportunities and promising them high returns only to disappear with their savings. The show presents Elaine Nelson, one of Hunt’s victims, who was left penniless after having invested all of her money in one of Hunt’s companies. When contacted by FBI agents, Ms Nelson was told about Hunt’s other successful con operations. Should the knowledge that there are additional victims increase Barry Hunt’s moral liability for his actions? Theoretical models of ethical judgment take a similar view. According to the Moral Intensity Model (Jones, 1991, p. 374), “an act that causes 1,000 people to suffer a particular injury is of greater magnitude of consequence than an act that causes 10 people to suffer the same injury.”

Results

Discussion

Conclusion