Robustness and Cultural Difference on Identifiable Victim Effect

This study reviews the unresolved identifiable victim effect (IVE) issues. IVE indicates that people are more willing to help an identified victim than to an unidentified number of victims, such as statistical information. Previous studies have demonstrated the robustness of this phenomenon. However, existing studies on IVE have been conducted primarily in Western cultures and their applicability to East Asian cultures has not been sufficiently examined. Recently, some studies have begun to explore cultural differences in IVE and have suggested that IVE may be less likely to occur in East Asian cultures which exhibit a predominantly interdependent construal of self, compared to Western cultures which exhibit a predominantly independent construal of self. This is the first study to confirm the mechanism of IVE and the methods used to suppress it. Furthermore, studies on meta-analyses and cultural differences in IVE are reviewed, and prospects are discussed.