What it looks like
Some experiments find greater giving to an identified individual than to statistical appeals. News coverage has also been linked to U.S. government disaster relief decisions. These findings do not establish a rule for every appeal or for private disaster donations.
Why it happens
Published studies report several attention effects, with important limits. In experiments by Deborah Small, George Loewenstein and Paul Slovic, people gave more to help one identified child than to help many children described with statistics, and adding the statistics to the child’s story lowered giving. Slovic calls the wider pattern “psychic numbing”: concern does not grow with the number of people suffering, and it can shrink. Outside the lab, Thomas Eisensee and David Strömberg studied U.S. government disaster relief and found that competing news affected coverage and relief decisions. Their outcome was government assistance, not private charitable gifts.
A pre-registered replication published in 2024, using hypothetical donations, found no support for the classic identifiable-victim effect. The original studies used real donations, so more high-powered tests with real money would help. See the evidence and replication limits.
Charitology’s hypothesis is that attention effects can influence allocation across the charity system. The studies here do not measure that overall effect. Humanity’s Checklist names attention as one of the six sources upstream of every world problem.
No one is to blame
Being moved by one person is not a flaw in anyone’s character. The question is which kinds of information help people make the decisions they value, and under what conditions.
What we don’t know yet
Can a story be built to make people feel the scale of a problem, and does it change where money goes? That is Open Problem 7, Story Without Bias.
Stories carry scale. People feel the size of a problem, not just one face, and money follows need instead of news.