This Will Not Make You Cry
Human Compassion Surprisingly Limited, Study Finds
By Sara Goudarzi
February 16, 2007
SAN FRANCISCO—While a person’s accidental death reported on the evening news can bring viewers to tears, mass killings reported as statistics fail to tickle human emotions, a new study finds.
The Internet and other modern communications bring atrocities such as killings in Darfur, Sudan into homes and office cubicles. But knowledge of these events fails to motivate most to take action, said Paul Slovic, a University of Oregon researcher.
People typically react very strongly to one death but their emotions fade as the number of victims increase, Slovic reported here yesterday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
“We go all out to save a single identified victim, be it a person or an animal, but as the numbers increase, we level off,” Slovic said. “We don’t feel any different to say 88 people dying than we do to 87. This is a disturbing model, because it means that lives are not equal, and that as problems become bigger we become insensitive to the prospect of additional deaths.”
Human insensitivity to large-scale human suffering has been observed in the past century with genocides in Armenia, the Ukraine, Nazi Germany and Rwanda, among others.
“We have to understand what it is in our makeup—psychologically, socially, politically and institutionally—that has allowed genocide to go unabated for a century,” Slovic said. “If we don’t answer that question and use the answer to change things, we will see another century of horrible atrocities around the world.”
Slovic previously studied this phenomenon by presenting photographs to a group of subjects. In the first photograph eight children needed $300,000 to receive medical attention in order to save their lives. In the next photograph, one child needed $300,000 for medical bills.
Most subjects were willing to donate to the one and not the group of children.
In his latest research, Slovic and colleagues showed three photos to participants: a starving African girl, a starving African boy and a photo of both of them together.
Participants felt equivalent amounts of sympathy for each child when viewed separately, but compassion levels declined when the children were viewed together.
“The studies … suggest a disturbing psychological tendency,” Slovic said. “Our capacity to feel is limited. Even at two, people start to lose it.”
4 Responses to “This Will Not Make You Cry”
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Ashamed on 18 Feb 2007 at 5:33 am #
Mr. Slovic’s study shows perfectly the inability of one man or a whole nation to understand the human suffering of masses during genocidal periods that take place from time to time.
I do not remember if much was said or done to stop mass killings of Saddam Hussein in late 1900s, but we had our own former Attorney General Clark ready at the drop of a hat to defend Saddam, to save him from the gallows.
Go figure.
re: ashamed on 19 Feb 2007 at 5:49 am #
– without trying to defend saddam, i want to point out that the question is more complex than that, since you’re talking about already occured deaths vs. future death(s).
Eso on 20 Feb 2007 at 8:17 pm #
Stalin said it best – One death is a tragedy, one million is a statistic.
Richard Bargen, MD on 21 Feb 2007 at 4:28 am #
“The studies … suggest a disturbing psychological tendency…” to leap to false conclusions as a result of extrapolations unsupported by the evidence. The world is entering into a new, unforseen age, when human compassion and efforts to relieve the sufferings of others will be a ‘milestone’ when future historians look back at us. This new Age of Compassion, is the child of an epi-phenomenon rising from the global communications and media nets that have enfiladed human society in the recent past. Predictable [in hindsight] in the 1880s, when the completion of the global telegraphic cable nets first tied us all into a global community.