Scope neglect (also known as scope insensitivity) is the cognitive bias that causes people to value an issue in ways that ignore or give insufficient weight to its 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.