The collapse of compassion
This month’s Wired magazine mentions a study by professor Paul Slovic who shows how empathy doesn’t scale. Humans respond to one person’s sufferings, but when the number of victims increases, we tend to care less and less as things become more abstract. Slovic is basically explaining why we tend to react more to Madeleine McCann’s disappearance than to the Darfur Genocide.
Most people are caring and will exert great effort to rescue individual victims whose needy plight comes to their attention. These same good people, however, often become numbly indifferent to the plight of individuals who are “one of many” in a much greater problem.
That is a key information that the world’s NGOs and governments need to take into account to develop more effective ways to communicate and mobilize the masses.
October 2nd, 2007 at 3:20 pm
I gave a talk at UNICEF earlier this year about the theme of Massively Parallel Emotion, the idea that technology (broadcast, Internet, messaging) creates the ability for everyone who is connected to experience collective emotional experience almost in real time. The example I gave that day was of the recent Mexico City earthquake, which was essentially crowd-reported via Twitter as it happened, in advance of actual confirmation by seismologists. As I gave the talk, the shootings at Virginia Tech were underway (we couldn’t know it at the time), which provided a very sad example of the same theme.
The talk at UNICEF was in response to the organization’s realization after the Asian tsunami that in fact communication technology and media can be harnessed to allow response to this Massively Parallel Emotion in a constructive fashion. The junta in Myanmar recognize this as well, and have taken steps to cut Internet access and confiscate communication technology to reduce the scale of the “emotional surge”.
Being better prepared for how technology and communication channels may be used in the next global or regional crisis can give UNICEF and other NGOs a greater ability to be of assistance sooner.
March 13th, 2008 at 10:41 pm
“A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.”
— Joseph Stalin
It seems that dictators have understood this for a long time.
March 15th, 2008 at 5:25 pm
Definitely true, and very common?
It’s like with truth in politics, it seems the bigger a lie is, the easier it will go through with public opinion. There is room for a nice study on the psychology of public opinion.