Thinking and Deciding

INTUITIONS 429
the punitive effects on whoever provides it. (For discussions of the theory of compensation,
see: Calabresi, 1970; Friedman, 1982). Compensation should depend only
on the nature of the loss for the victim. Any departure from this utilitarian standard
implies that some victims will be overcompensated or others undercompensated, or
both.
One intuition is that compensation for a misfortune should be greater when the
misfortune might have been avoided easily. This does not affect the utility of money
for the victim. Miller and McFarland (1986) found that subjects would provide more
compensation for a harm suffered in unusual circumstances (a person shot while
going to a store that he did not usually go to) than for a harm suffered in the normal
course of events (a person going to a store he often went to).
A possible utilitarian justification for this difference is that victims were more
emotionally upset in the former case than in the latter. Ritov and Baron (1994) found
the same sort of result when subjects understood that the victim did not know the
cause of the injury or the alternatives to it. In all cases, subjects were told that a
train accident had occurred because a fallen tree blocked the railroad tracks. In one
case, the victim was injured by the train’s sudden stop to avoid hitting the tree. In
another case, the same injury was caused by an unexpected collision with the tree.
Subjects judged that more compensation should be provided (by a special fund) when
the train’s unexpected failure to stop caused the injury than when the suddenness of
the stop was the cause. The results were found whether the failure was that of an
automatic stopping device or of a human engineer. If the person who caused the
accident, the injurer, were required to pay the victim, then it would be reasonable to
make the injurer pay more when the accident was more easily avoided, because the
injurer would be more likely to be at fault in this case. But the compensation was
paid from a fund, not by the injurer. Subjects might have been using an intuitive rule
that is consistent with utilitarianism in some cases but not in the case at hand.
A similar sort of misapplication of a rule might be at work in another phenomenon,
the person-causation bias. Here, subjects judge that more compensation
should be provided by a third party when an injury is caused by human beings than
when it is caused by nature (Baron, 1993c; Baron and Ritov, 1993). For example,
subjects provided more compensation to a person who lost a job from unfair and
illegal practices of another business than to one who lost a job from normal business
competition. (Neither victim knew the cause.) The same result was found for blindness
caused by a restaurant’s violation of sanitary rules versus blindness caused by
disease spread by a mosquito.
This effect might arise from a desire to punish someone, despite the fact that this
desire cannot be satisfied. Ordinarily, punishment and compensation are correlated,
because the injurer is punished by having to compensate the victim (or possibly
even by the shame of seeing that others must compensate the victim). But when
this correlation is broken, subjects seem to continue to use the same heuristic rule.
This sort of reasoning might account in part for the general lack of concern about the
discrepancy between victims of natural disease, who are rarely compensated (beyond
their medical expenses), and victims of human activity, who are often compensated a