Narrative over Numbers: The Identifiable Victim Effect and its Amplification Under Alignment and Reasoning in Large Language Models

arXiv:2604.12076v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The Identifiable Victim Effect (IVE) $-$ the tendency to allocate greater resources to a specific, narratively described victim than to a statistically characterized group facing equivalent hardship $-$ is one of the most robust findings in moral psychology and behavioural economics. As large language models (LLMs) assume consequential roles in humanitarian triage, automated grant evaluation, and content moderation, a critical question arises: do