No One Left Behind: How Social Distance Affects Life-Saving Decision Making

This research explored how social distance affects risk preference in the life-saving domain. We found that decisionmakers tend to be more risk-seeking when the lives of close others versus distant others are at stake. By analyzing the shape of value function, we showed that the underlying mechanism for this difference in risk attitude might be that decision-makers engage in feeling-based evaluation when close others’ lives are at stake but calculation-based evaluation when distant others’ lives are at stake.