Individual suffering is felt; aggregate suffering is processed as information.
Misattributed to Stalin. The earliest known version appeared in a French satirical paper in 1924, was reused by Bienstock and Curnonsky that year and by Tucholsky in 1925, and was first pinned on Stalin in 1947.
In practice
- A single rescue is on the front page for a week, and the annual figure it belongs to appears once, in a table.
- The researched version is the identifiable victim effect: a named beneficiary raises far more than the same appeal stated as a population.
- Possible explanations
- The explanation is psychic numbing: response to suffering does not scale with number, and identifiable individuals produce feeling that aggregates do not.
- In its favour
- The underlying effect is well measured, since experiments find giving falls as the number of victims rises, and the identifiable victim effect is robust.
- Against it
- It is misattributed to Stalin, with the earliest known version appearing in a French satirical paper in 1924, and as a maxim it describes the failure without saying what to do about it.
- Standing
- Misattributed to Stalin. Earliest known version appeared in a French satirical paper in 1924, was reused by Bienstock and Curnonsky that year and by Tucholsky in 1925, and was first pinned on Stalin in 1947.
- Subject
- Communication & Media
- Essay
- The folk laws of argument and attention