The Arithmetic of Compassion - The New York Times - 1 views
www.nytimes.com/...-arithmetic-of-compassion.html
new york times psychology compassion innumeracy abstraction
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WE all can relate to the saying “One death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.” Our sympathy for suffering and loss declines precipitously when we are presented with increasing numbers of victims.
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studied survivors of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and discovered that a condition he labeled “psychic numbing” enabled them to withstand the psychological trauma of this experience.
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concept of psychic numbing has implications in many other situations, such as our response to information about refugee crises, mass extinctions and climate change. This information can be deadening in its abstractness. We struggle to care when the numbers get big. The poet Zbigniew Herbert called this “the arithmetic of compassion.”
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The image of Aylan lying face down on the beach captivated the world’s attention and even, in short order, resulted in refugee policy changes in countries as far away as the United States. But 14 Syrian children drowned in the Aegean Sea the next day. Did you notice? Did you care?
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demonstrated that “compassion fade” can occur when an incident involving a single person expands to as few as two people
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In addition to psychic numbing, there is another psychological disposition at work, called “pseudoinefficacy.”
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We found that people might be inclined to send money to an individual person in need, but that if they heard that a second person also required aid but could not be helped, they were less inclined to donate to the first person. Meeting that need no longer felt as satisfying. Similarly, when the need for assistance was described as part of a large-scale relief effort, potential donors would experience a demotivating sense of inefficacy arising from the thought that the help they could provide was but “a drop in the bucket.”
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It seems that we are psychologically wired to help only one person at a time. And we don’t even care to do that if we sense that there are others we cannot help.
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In addition, we believe that yet another psychological tendency, the “prominence effect,” explains why genuinely well-meaning people (and their governments) so often fail to intervene to prevent genocides and other large-scale abuses. “Prominent” actions or objectives are those that are easily justified, though they may not match our stated social values.
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Decisions that protect national security or satisfy our attachment to near-term comforts and conveniences are easily justified. Such choices, as Paul Slovic explains in a recent University of Illinois Law Review article, are likely to trump decisions to protect people or the environment, especially when the humans in need or the environmental phenomena in jeopardy (species, habitats, the planet’s climate) are so vast in scale as to seem distant and abstract.
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argued decades ago, in their book “New World New Mind,” that our minds had failed to keep up with the times — that we were, in a sense, cave men and cave women, struggling to deal with modern problems, like nuclear annihilation, to which our minds were not suited. They called for a “conscious evolution” in how we processed information about the modern world, meaning an intentional change in our cognitive habits.
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We need to be alert to how psychic numbing, pseudoinefficacy and the prominence effect lead us to act in ways contrary to our values. Doing so can help us to improve our reactions to information about a complex and often upsetting world