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Scope Neglect

Explain why elicited valuations stay flat across hundredfold changes in magnitude — the count is replaced by a single affect-laden prototype, so the number is understood but never priced in.

Core Idea

Scope neglect is the regularity that the value a person attaches to an outcome is strikingly insensitive to its magnitude. Asked to pay to save 2,000, 20,000, or 200,000 oiled birds, respondents return near-identical figures. The valuation tracks a single emotionally charged prototype — one drowning bird — not the count behind it. Kahneman and Frederick call this attribute substitution: a hard target (scope-weighted value) is swapped for an easy one (prototype affect).

Scope of Application

Scope neglect is a workhorse diagnostic across the valuation and risk subfields of judgment and decision-making, reaching within that domain, not across substrates.

  • Contingent valuation in environmental economics — the home turf, failing the scope test.
  • Charitable giving / identifiable-victim literature — flat donations in victim count.
  • Risk perception and health communication — "thousands" versus "millions" elicit similar responses.
  • Public-goods valuation and policy support — support fails to scale with stated reach.
  • Jury awards — outrage tracks blameworthiness, not dollar magnitude.

Clarity

Without the label, a flat willingness-to-pay curve looks like a survey that "didn't work," inviting ad hoc explanations — bad sampling, hypothetical bias. With it, the analyst asks a sharp structural question: is the elicitation delivering magnitude in usable form, or harvesting prototype-keyed affect? That separates a genuine preference from a substitution artifact, and localizes the breakdown to valuation rather than comprehension or expression.

Manages Complexity

The stated-preference literature is a sprawl of anomalies — embedding, part–whole bias, probability insensitivity, the single–joint disparity. Scope neglect compresses a large slice into one regularity: valuation under affect-heavy single evaluation is flat in scope. An analyst then treats scope sensitivity as one measurable slope, and reasons from two parameters — how affect-heavy the representation, whether the format forces comparison — to predict when the anomaly appears.

Abstract Reasoning

Scope neglect licenses three moves, all from the substitution mechanism: diagnostic (a flat valuation implies an easier affect-based question was answered, predicting embedding and single–joint disparity); interventionist (change the form of magnitude — joint evaluation, forced trade-offs — and predict the slope steepens); and boundary-drawing (a figure passing the scope test enters cost–benefit analysis; one that fails cannot). The concept is a validity gate.

Knowledge Transfer

Within JDM the diagnostic transfers cleanly and literally: any numerical valuation of an affect-heavy outcome should be scope-tested, and the same fixes apply — the currency changes, the structure and remedies do not. To adjacent fields (marketing's price-evaluability work) transfer is partial, resting on shared mechanism. Beyond elicited valuation the phenomenon dissolves into its neighbors, so the load-bearing cross-domain weight is carried by the parent prime logarithmic_perception_and_encoding (with the flat case its saturated end).

Relationships to Other Abstractions

Local relationship map for Scope NeglectParents appear above the current abstraction, mutual partners to the right, and children below. Node labels state whether each abstraction is prime or domain-specific; colors identify relation types.Scope NeglectDOMAINDomain-specific abstraction: Attribute Substitution — is part ofAttributeSubstitutionDOMAIN

Current abstraction Scope Neglect Domain-specific

Parents (1) — more general patterns this builds on

  • Scope Neglect is part of Attribute Substitution Domain-specific

    Scope neglect contains attribute substitution as its defining internal judgment operation: scope-weighted value is silently replaced by prototype affect, producing the flat magnitude response.

Hierarchy path (1) — routes to 1 parentless root

Neighborhood in Abstraction Space

Scope Neglect sits in a sparse region of the domain-specific corpus (97th percentile for distinctiveness): few abstractions share its structure, so a faithful description tends to retrieve it precisely.

Family — Unclustered & Miscellaneous (309 abstractions)

Nearest neighbors

Computed from structural-signature embeddings · 2026-07-12