The Singularity Effect of Identifiable Victims

“已确认受害者效应”一词指的是相对于身份不明的人，人们更愿意帮助已确认的受害者(他们掌握了一些信息的受害者)。过去的研究表明，这种影响仅限于单个受害者；这意味着识别一个受害者(通过添加名字或照片)会增加帮助，而识别一个群体的个别成员对帮助的影响较小。这个项目探索了帮助一个可识别的单身人士的偏好的根源，考察了在个人主义和集体主义社会中幼儿这种偏好的发展。因此，这项研究旨在为人类社会行为的一个最重要的方面提供一些洞察：帮助其他有需要的人的意愿。它的目的是为理解可识别受害者效应的来源和亲社会行为发展的文献做出重大的理论贡献。研究小组正在进行九项实验。一些人研究了幼儿？S愿意帮助经历同样需要的可识别的单一和群体目标，以帮助澄清可识别的受害者效应是否随着年龄的增长而发展，如果是的话，这种趋势在儿童时期何时开始出现。这项研究解决的问题是，社会是否能够传递加强对有需要的人群体的关怀所需的情感。此外，研究还探讨了帮助单一可识别受害者的偏好是否可能是文化和教育的结果。具体地说，西方社会的个人主义(根据个人主义的观点，个人是社会存在的目的)可能会加强人们对一个受害者的关心，并导致与群体缺乏关联性。如果是这样的话，预计在持有更多集体主义观点(强调群体或社区而不是每个人的至高无上)的社会中的人不会表现出这种偏好。除了其理论贡献之外，这项拟议的研究还对增加亲社会行为的频率和强度作为最佳人类发展的一部分具有重要的实践意义。

The term "identified victim effect" refers to people's greater willingness to help identified victims (victims about whom they have some information) relative to unidentified persons. Past research suggests that the effect is restricted to single victims; meaning that identifying a single victim (by adding a name or a picture) increases helping, while the identification of individual members of a group has less effect on helping. This project explores the roots of the preference for helping a single, identifiable person, examining the development of this preference in young children within individualistic and collectivist societies. Hence the research intends to offer some insight into a most important facet of human social behavior: the willingness to help others in need. It aims to make significant theoretical contributions to understanding the sources of the identifiable victim effect and to the literature on the development of pro-social behavior.The research team is conducting nine experiments. Some examine young children?s willingness to help identifiable single and group targets experiencing the same need to help clarify whether the identifiable victim effect develops with age and if so, when, in childhood, this tendency begins to appear. The research addresses the question of whether society can impart the feelings that are needed for enhancing caring for groups of people in need. In addition, the research explores whether the preference for helping the single identifiable victim may be a result of culture and education. Specifically, Western societies' individualism (according to which the individual person is the purpose for which society exists) may enhance people's caring for the one victim and cause the lack of relatedness to the group. If that is the case, it is expected that people in societies that hold more collectivistic views (emphasizing the primacy of the group or community rather than each individual person) will show no such preference. In addition to its theoretical contribution, the proposed research has important practical implications for increasing the frequency and strength of pro-social behavior as part of optimal human development.