W hy do people engage in charitable giving? Certainly there are many reasons for this. Social norms, social perceptions, religious convictions, and other considerations may all play a role. However, beyond all those reasons, the wish to help other people, particularly when those people are in need of external help, is the core motivation for charitable giving and helping behavior. Thus, in order to better understand the psychological motivation of charitable giving, it is important to explore the factors that may increase or decrease the fundamental wish to extend help. One of the main factors that affects the wish to aid is the characteristics of the target—the recipient of the help. Why do some targets elicit outpourings of sympathy and aid, while other targets do not? This chapter focuses on an important characteristic of the targets that affect people’s willingness to help: the identifiability of the recipient. The notion that people are sometimes willing to contribute more to save an identified victim than a nonidentified one has a strong intuitive appeal. Schelling, in his seminal economic analysis of the worth of preventing human death (Schelling, 1968) noted the distinction between individual lives and statistical lives. Because he recognized that the death of an individual is a unique event, Schelling applied his analysis only to nonidentified lives. Schelling’s assumption concerning the different reactions to identified and nonidentified lives has been experimentally tested in the last decade (Jenni & Loewenstein, 1997; Small & Loewenstein, 2003; Kogut & Ritov, 2005a, 2005b; Small, Loewenstein, & Slovic, 2007; Slovic, 2007). These carefully controlled studies show that people are more generous toward an identifiable victim than toward unidentifiable or statistical victims, even when the identification of a specific victim does not convey any relevant individuating information.