We have already become accustomed to accepting that, daily, the victims of COVID-19 number in the hundreds. What in other areas would only be a scandal if there were a dozen victims, or even one or two victims, here we are not so moved, or at least not proportionally.
This happens. basically, for two psychological effects: “singularity effect” and “psychic numbing.”
Singularity and numbness
The great atrocities they do not generate proportional reactions to motivate action, but individual stories reach deeper levels of our emotions and push us to act with greater urgency and investment of means.
Therefore, people donate a lot more money to help an identifiable victim (for example, a child or family) than an unidentifiable victim, especially if we talk about a very large number of victims.
The authors of this recent study, from August 2020, confirmed this bias by carrying out text analysis of the New York Times and other sources that publish the loss of life, analyzing the affect and emotion of the text (sentimental analysis) in the readers. Concluding, in sum, that: the more they die, the less we care.
In other words: our ability to feel sympathy for people in need seems limited, and this form of compassion fatigue can lead to apathy and inaction, consistent with what is repeatedly seen in response to many large-scale human and environmental catastrophes. scale.
Or as the Nobel Prize in Medicine summarized Albert Szent-Gyorgi:
It moves me deeply to see a man suffering and I would risk my life for him. Then he spoke impersonally about the possible pulverization of our great cities, with one hundred million dead. I am incapable of multiplying the suffering of one man by a hundred million.
This tendency to conceptualize humanity as a few individuals is because we do not have enough mental capacity to process so many people. Our brain was forged in a past world where we were part of tribes of just 100 or 150 individuals. Spending mental energy on more individuals was a waste.
For that reason, too, we tend to think of the authors of inventions or literary works as unique geniuses and not as much as factor ecosystems (which also involve hundreds or thousands of other brains). Or that the debauchery of cities like Amsterdam is due to policies created by human beings and not interconnected coincidences, like the discovery of something tiny in the guts of herrings and that Amsterdam was built on a quagmire:
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The news
We are more moved by the loss of an individual life than by the loss of thousands of lives.
was originally published in
Xataka Science
by
Sergio Parra
.