This article is from WeChat public account: Neural Reality (ID: neureality) , author: Resnick, from FIG title: Oriental IC
The suffering of one person is suffering, and the suffering of many people is just numbers? As the number of victims in misery increases, our sympathy decreases.
While the number of cases has increased significantly and more countries have reported confirmed cases, the World Health Organization (WHO) ends today During the meeting, the new coronavirus epidemic constituted a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC) . As of the date of publication, China has nearly 10,000 confirmed cases and more than 200 people have died.
WHO subsequently emphasized in its tweet: “We must keep in mind that those are
Image source: Twitter
As with this incident, many of the world ’s largest and most difficult problems are linked to thousands of people: tens of millions of people are displaced in the global refugee crisis; 1 million people still die of malaria each year; according to estimates by the United Nations The famine in Yemen in 2018 caused 14 million people to starve to death.
We always hope that tragedies of this scale will be matched by raging, sympathetic and kind actions. Unfortunately, this is not the case with human psychology. Mass suffering does not amplify our fears or sympathies. They just paralyze us. Think of these numbers. Can you imagine 1 million people? Seriously, imagine it. When we see a life, we can imagine its hope and pain. We can understand the myriad complexity in the life experience of this life. But what about 1 million people? What about 68 million people? You cannot imagine. These numbers feel like an abstract concept. When the number exceeds the limit of the number of disasters that human beings can care for and care about, a cunningly outrageous paradox appears.
Leonardo Santamaria
This is mental numbness. It means that as the number of victims in suffering increases, our compassion and our willingness to help others will inevitably decline. This can happen even if the number of victims increases from one to two. Mental numbness means diminishing returns to human compassion. This is a question worth pondering, especially on days like Tuesday’s Feedback Day, where many charities will raise money for the troubled millions. Studies have shown that charities need to highlight personal stories and get people’s attention. Although mental numbness seems to be a stable part of human psychology, there is always a way to overcome it, and there is always a way for us to connect with millions of people in need.
Mental numbness and its interpretation
Most of our understanding of mental numbness comes from Paul Slovich, a psychologist at the University of Oregon.n class = “text-remarks” label = “Remarks”> (Paul Slovic) , he has been studying the intersection between emotion and decision-making for decades. I often report on political psychology. In conversations with scientists, I often ask, “What kind of research can help you understand what’s happening in the world?” The answer often involves Slovich’s research on why we turn a blind eye to large-scale misery-both the world The refugee crisis is still a domestic medical problem. Slovich’s research is often cited by many psychologists trying to understand decision making.
Slovakia and his colleague’s “donations to children in distress” experiment. ——Image source: Vox
This is naked truth. “An individual’s life has no eternal value.” Slovich told me in 2017, “In the context of greater suffering, the value of a single person’s life will only be weakened.” A recent study by Slovich was very This is simply proven. During the experiment, Slovich and his colleagues asked participants if they were willing to donate to children in distress. When the number of victims in the experiment increased from one to two, researchers recorded that participants’ sympathy for their children decreased, and their donations to children also decreased. this is all.
In the context of greater suffering,The value of one’s life will only be weakened
For example. What would you think if someone told you that you could take action to save 4,500 people in a refugee camp? Sounds good, right? You will be a hero. However, in some cases, saving so many people does not make you feel too good, and you are unlikely to do so. In an experiment, Slovich said, “If there are 250,000 people in refugee camps, people are unlikely to do things that can save 4,500 lives, and if there are 11,000 people in refugee camps, people are even more Maybe save the 4500 people. ” The number of people rescued is the same. But in a larger context of suffering, helping that group of victims feels less good.
Eleni Debo
One reason is that as the number of victims in suffering increases, we feel more and more unable to help, so we turn off the sympathy switch. But this helplessness is a lie. Slovich reminds us: “Even improvements in some areas can save lives.” Small changes in gun control laws can save lives, and donating mosquito nets worth little can save lives. Even if you can’t save a person from a difficult situation, doing something to ease their pain will help. Struggling in numbness is difficult; it goes against our intuition.
We are indifferent to the plight of millions of people, but soon resonate with personal circumstances
Why do we do this? Why can’t we expand and accumulate our compassion when more people are in trouble? The answer is basically that our brain resists this thinking. Slovich explained: “The sensory system does not stack up. Feelings cannot be multiplied, it cannot do arithmetic problems.” Daniel Kahneman (Daniel Kahneman) and Amos Tver (Amos Tversky) has a similar concept in the prospect theory: the gap between $ 0 and $ 100 feels larger than $ 100 and 200 The gap between the dollars. The difference is still $ 100, but people become numb. When the numbers start from 0, this gap from scratch can bring you greater impact.
Leonardo Santamaria
Yes, the brain cannot imagine millions of people, but it is really good at thinking and caring about personal problems. We can understand individuals: this is why the story of a sick child tends to concern us more than the crisis of the public. Remember Charlie Gard (Charlie Gard) ? In 2017, he was 11 months old and came from the UK with a rare and fatal disease. Some Republicans in the U.S. Congress want Gade to become a U.S. resident so he can get experimental treatment. It’s also these Republicans, many of whom voted in favor of health care legislation that would cost millions of people in the U.S. health care. That boy is an emergency patient.
What about millions? Just an abstract number. This is a key insight in the study of mental numbness: our sensory system does not perform mathematical operations. “The first is: protect yourself. Then protect those in front of me,” Slovich said. “Protect those who are similar to us, those who are near us, and those who have recently encountered difficulties. And so on-when these people are in danger, we have a strong emotional response. “Not only that, empathy is often biased: we tend to automatically empathize with people like us.
Compassion for a single victim may be transferred to more people
There are ways to combat mental numbness. Charities have long understood the “identifiable victim effect”, where the image of a single victim is more likely to cause empathy than statistics or the story of a large group of people. A photo of a drowning Syrian refugee boy, Alan Kurdi, in 2015. (Alan Kurdi, whose name is also reported as Aylan) It became a powerful and tragic focus of public opinion on the Syrian civil war. This civil war has so far killed hundreds of thousands of people and displaced millions.
Drown Syrian refugee boy Photo Credit: Nilufer Demir / Turkish Doan News Agency
Slovich, citing a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), said that seeing this photo, “People suddenly started to care about the Syrian war and refugees, and hundreds of thousands of people who died before The statistics didn’t get them to notice this. “According to Google search results, attention to the Syrian war lasted about a month.
The search for the Syrian war, refugees and boy Aylan himself has suddenly increased and lasted for about a month. ——Image source: Vox
Not justSearch for attention. After the photo was released, charitable donations to help Syrian refugees also increased significantly.
Charitable donations to help Syrian refugees have also increased significantly. ——Image source: Vox
“The dramatic stories of these individuals or photos provide us with a window of opportunity to suddenly wake up and stop being numb, and we want to do something.” Slovich said, “If people find they can Something, such as donating to the Red Cross, people will do it. But if they can do nothing but donate money, then over time, mental numbness will happen again. “We can do something else: at any time, as long as We can emphasize people’s personal encounters and unique humanity in a huge misery, so that people can start to pay attention to this group.
Psychologists have long known that simple changes in phrases can change our thinking. In 2017, psychologist Kurt Gray (Kurt Gray) and colleagues tried a fine-tuned wording to increase public awareness Sympathy of others.
It’s very simple: What if we don’t emphasize “a group of people”, but highlight “individuals in a group”? Is the emphasis on personal experience and human nature sufficient to encourage people to feel, think, and empathize with this person?
This works. Emphasizing personal stories allows participants to see more humanity. Here’s a simple lesson: Saying “100 Syrian refugees” may be more emotionally resonant than “100 Syrian refugees.”
However, inspiring compassion remains a huge challenge for charities. The big problems faced by this world always involve all sentient beings, but we are born with only the emotional ability to care for small groups that are closely connected with individuals. “Look at the problems that exist in our world,” Slovich said. “There are so many people involved in all kinds of problems.” Big problems in the world need more attention. So we must fight against the tendency to be numb.
This article is from WeChat public account: Neural Reality (ID: neureality) , author: Resnick