Conceptualizing of large numbers of deaths and other atrocities is overwhelming. Logic tells us that the death of 100,000 people is more tragic than the death of 100, but does the increase really produce any change in emotion--or even the expected change of emotions: increased compassion vesus a sense of numbness?
University of Oregon psychologist Paul Slovic is studying this psychological response in hopes of better understanding the lack of intervention in multiple 20th century genocides. The results are disturbing. They show that not only is compassion numbed once numbers turn into zero-trailed statistics--it lessens as soon as one victim increases to two.
His research follows a 2005 study that showed people were far less willing to donate money to help eight children who required $300,000 for medical treatment than one child who required the same $300,000 in treatment.
Slovic and colleagues repeated the study, this time soliciting donations for a starving African girl and boy. When shown individually, the children's stories invoked similar levels of sympathy and spurred similar levels of donations. Shown together, however, both levels of sympathy and contributions fell considerably.
"The studies just described suggest a disturbing psychological tendency," Slovic said. "Our capacity to feel is limited. Even at two, he added, people start to lose it.Slovic hopes to show that we cannot count on moral intuition alone but must determine a "rigidly defined threshold" at which intevention is necessary in order to urge a rewriting of the 1948 Genocide Convention. Ratified by 137 United Nations member states, the convention qualified and outlawed genocide but has never been used to stop a genocide and was enforced only once, to prosecute former Rwandan mayor Jean-Paul Akayesu in 1998.
Read more: How do we stop genocide when we begin to lose interest after the first victim?
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