University of Oregon News, OR
Feb 17 2007

A sure time to halt genocide?

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. – (Feb. 15, 2007) – Follow your intuition and act?
When it comes to genocide, forget it. It doesn’t work, says a
University of Oregon psychologist. The large numbers of reported
deaths represent dry statistics that fail to spark emotion and
feeling and thus fail to motivate actions. Even going from one to two
victims, feeling and meaning begin to fade, he said.

In a session Friday at the annual meeting of the American Association
for the Advancement of Science devoted to "Numbers and Nerves," Paul
Slovic, a UO professor and president of Decision Research, a
non-profit research institute in Eugene, Ore., urged a review and
overhaul of the 1948 Genocide Convention, mandated by much of the
world after the Holocaust in World War II. "It has obviously failed,
because it has never been invoked to intervene in genocide," Slovic
said.

Slovic is studying the issue from a psychological perspective, trying
to determine how people can utilize both the moral intuition that
genocide is wrong and moral reasoning to reach not only an outcry but
also demand intervention. "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," he 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."

In the 20th century, genocides have occurred in Armenia, Ukraine,
Nazi Germany, Bangladesh, Cambodia, the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda and
Zimbabwe. Currently, killings continue in Darfur. "America has done
little or nothing to stop genocide," Slovic said, adding that the
lack of response has come from both Republican and Democratic
administrations. Research shows that people cannot trust moral
intuitions to drive action. "Instead, we have to create institutions
and laws that will force us to do what we know through moral argument
is the right thing to do."

Figuring out how to reach that critical mass for decision-making,
however, will be a challenge. It is thought that every life is
equally important, and thus the value of saving lives rises linearly
as the numbers of people at risk increase.

However, models based on psychology are unmasking a haze on the
issue. One model suggests that people react very strongly around the
zero point. "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," he
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."

In Slovic’s latest research, evidence is mounting for an even more
disturbing "collapse model" that he described in his talk. "This
model appears to be more accurate than the psychophysical model in
describing our response to genocide," he said. "We have these large
numbers of deaths occurring, and we are doing nothing."

His new research follows up an Israeli study published in 2005 in
which subjects were presented three photos. One depicted eight
children who needed $300,000 in medical intervention to save their
lives. Another photo depicted just one child who could be helped with
$300,000. Participants were most willing to donate for one child’s
medical care. The level of giving declined dramatically for donating
to help the entire group.

Slovic and colleagues Daniel Vastfjäll and Ellen Peters used the same
approach but narrowed the focus. Participants in Sweden were shown a
photo of a starving African girl, her individual story and the
conditions of the nation in which she lives. Another photo contained
the same information but for a starving boy. A third photo showed
both children. The feelings of sympathy for each individual child
were almost equal, but dropped when they were considered together.
Donations followed the same pattern, being lower for two needy
children than for either individually.

"The studies just described suggest a disturbing psychological
tendency," Slovic said. "Our capacity to feel is limited." Even at
just two individuals, he added, people start to lose sympathy.

If we see the beginning of the collapse of feeling at just two
individuals, "It is no wonder that at 200,000 deaths the feeling is
gone," Slovic said. This insensitivity to large numbers is
understandable from an evolutionary perspective. Early humans fought
to protect themselves and their families. "There was no adaptive or
survival value in protecting hundreds of thousands of people on the
other side of the planet," he said. "Today, we have modern
communications that can tell us about crises occurring on the other
side of the world, but we are still reacting the same way as we would
have long ago."

The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, based in Menlo Park,
Calif., is a major supporter of Slovic’s current research.

2.15.07-Slovic-AAAS-Genocide.html

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress