Professionals often give advice to many anonymous people. For example, financial analysts give public recommendations to trade stock, and medical experts formulate clinical guidelines that affect many patients. Normatively, awareness of the advice-recipient’s identity should not influence the quality of advice, and when advice affects a larger number of people, if anything, greater care should be taken to ensure its accuracy. Yet, contrary to this logic and consistent with research on the identifiable victim effect, results from two experimental studies demonstrate that advisors confronting a financial conflict of interest give more biased advice to multiple than single recipients and to unidentified than identified single recipients. Increased intensity of feelings toward single identified recipients appears to drive this process; advisors experience more empathy and appear to have greater awareness and motivation to reduce bias in their advice when the recipient is single and identified.
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