Scope neglect (also known as scope insensitivity) is the cognitive bias that makes people insensitive to the size of problems. It can cause people to respond to problems in a way that’s disproportionate to the problem’s actual size.
Further reading
Animal Ethics (2020) Scope insensitivity: failing to appreciate the numbers of those who need our help, Animal Ethics.
Kahneman, Daniel & Amos Tversky (eds.) (2000) Choices, Values, and Frames, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 650–657.
Yudkowsky, Eliezer (2015) Scope insensitivity, in Rationality: From AI to Zombies, Berkeley: Machine Intelligence Research Institute, pp. 1453–1455.
Related entries
cognitive bias | debunking argument | expected value | rationality
See here for discussion of whether we should have one entry for each of many cognitive biases vs just one or a small set of entries covering a bunch of cognitive biases.
Perhaps Scope insensitivity would be a better name?
‘Scope neglect’ is about four times more popular on Google than ‘scope insensitivity’, and the name preferred by Wikipedia, so I would keep it.