Overcoming inattention to moral values in humanitarian decisions

There is ample evidence that people are inconsistent in the way that they value humanitarian objectives when making decisions about helping persons.

Most people believe they should give substantial weight to other people´s welfare when making decisions about charitable donations, allocating scarce resources, or providing support for refugees. Yet compassion extended towards individual victims often fades as the numbers of people in need increase.

Emotionally appealing but normatively weak attributes may take precedence over needs.

The resulting failures to help others often contradict one´s considered beliefs in the importance of giving them assistance.

This project tests the hypothesis that introspection about personal beliefs regarding how humanitarian concerns should influence behavior will reduce underweighting of these concerns. We test if introspection will help people make judgments and decisions that better reflect their considered values.

We propose studies to test: (a) that people weight concerns about others´ welfare less than they believe they should weight those concerns, a bias in humanitarian judgment and decision making; (b) that introspection can increase awareness of the discrepancy between people´s personal beliefs and their exhibited behavior; and (c) becoming aware of this discrepancy will lead people to reduce the inconsistency between their personal beliefs and behavior by increasing the weighting of others´ welfare in their judgments and decisions.