Willingness to help a needy person may depend on whether the person is perceived as responsible for their predicament. However, information regarding the cause is not always available, and people often ‘look the other way’ when it is. The present research explores whether potential donors choose to obtain information about the cause of the other’s need and, more importantly, how this choice to pursue information is affected by the donors’ feelings of entitlement. Across four studies, we find that decision makers who pursue information about why others are in need are more likely to offer help. Yet we also measure and manipulate the feelings of entitlement and find that those who are high in entitlement are more likely to seek the information regarding the person in need. Their higher tendency to pursue more information makes them more likely to help than they would otherwise.

We tested whether people engage in proportional thinking when comparing the value of the lives of people in different countries, specifically, whether people consider a certain number of lost lives in a smaller country to be equivalent to the loss of a larger number of lives in a country with a larger population. We found evidence for this form of proportional thinking in Study 1, and in Studies 2–3 we further observed that it is modulated by motivated reasoning: In Study 2, there was more proportional thinking when it benefited the ingroup (1 ingroup life equals 4 outgroup lives) than when it benefited the outgroup (1 outgroup life equals 4 ingroup lives). In Study 3, there was more proportional thinking when it benefited the victim in a war (1 victim life equals 4 aggressor lives) than when both countries were victims. Study 3 also showed that this form of proportional thinking is more prevalent when thinking about collectives (1,000 lives in the smaller country are equivalent to 4,000 lives in the larger country) versus individuals (1 life in the smaller country is equivalent to 4 lives in the larger country).