MSNBC, US
Feb 16 2007

As death increases, compassion recedes
Study finds mass death fails to spur emotion the way one tragedy can

By Sara Goudarzi
Staff Writer

Updated: 11:56 a.m. ET Feb. 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.’