| Are all lives valued equally? To answer this question, I adopted a metric new to social psychologists: dollars for lives. This unit of measurement has tremendous implications, as it may enable us to understand the social category disparities observed in domains in which tradeoffs between lives and money are made.; Two studies investigated the influence of social categories on estimates of monetary value of life (MVoL) in the healthcare domain. In the first study, which utilized value of statistical life (VSL) methodology, participants were asked to estimate how much money the government should pay to save persons affected by a deadly disease. The victims were described as being African American or European American, between the ages of 20 and 35 or 65 and 80, and responsible for their illness (i.e., unhealthy lifestyle) or not responsible for their illness (genetic-based), with the categories fully crossed and manipulated between-subjects. This study revealed that participants valued the lives of “blameworthy” less than “blameless” victims, especially when they were members of their own (White) ethnic group.; The second study examined the effects of social categories on MVoL by asking participants to make healthcare funding decisions for individual patients. Race, age, level of responsibility, and gender were manipulated within-subjects, thus making the intergroup context salient. Both age and level of responsibility consistently impacted participants' decisions such that they valued the lives of the young more than old and the lives of the “blameless” more than “blameworthy.” Interactions between level of responsibility and each age, race, and gender on some of the MVoL measures revealed that positive (i.e., not responsible) ingroup members were over-valued and/or negative (i.e., responsible) ingroup members were under-valued (relative to equivalent outgroup members).; Those who rely upon VSL and healthcare workers ought to be aware that their decisions are potentially biased. This may be acceptable as long as it is agreed upon that a category (e.g., age) is used in the decisions. To the extent that there is no such agreement, unintended discrimination may be the result. The consequences of this are by no means trivial, as lives are at stake. |
