Studies of victim number effects in charitable giving consistently find that people care more and help more when presented with an appeal to help an individual compared with an appeal to help multiple people in need. Across three online experiments (N = 1,348), Bayesian estimation revealed the opposite pattern when people responded to multiple appeals to help targets of different sizes (1, 2, 5, 7, and 12). In this joint evaluation context, participants donated more to larger groups, when appeals were presented in both ascending order (Study 1) and random order (Study 2). The pattern held whether or not participants saw an overview of all appeals at the start of the study and when a single individual was added to the array (Study 3). These results clarify how compassion fade findings typical of separate evaluations may not generalize to contexts in which people encounter multiple appeals within a short temporal window.

对慈善捐赠中受害者人数影响的研究一致发现，与呼吁帮助多个需要帮助的人相比，当人们提出帮助个人的呼吁时，人们会更加关心和帮助更多。跨越三个在线实验（N= 1,348），当人们响应多个呼吁以帮助不同大小的目标（1、2、5、7 和 12）时，贝叶斯估计揭示了相反的模式。在这种联合评估的背景下，参与者向更大的群体捐赠了更多，而上诉以升序（研究 1）和随机顺序（研究 2）呈现。无论参与者在研究开始时是否看到所有上诉的概述以及何时将单个个体添加到阵列中（研究 3），该模式都成立。这些结果阐明了单独评估中典型的同情淡化结果可能无法推广到人们在短时间内遇到多种诉求的情况。