[4] Slovic also introduced the concept of psychophysical numbing—the diminished sensitivity to the value of life and an inability to appreciate loss—by taking a collectivist interpretation of the phenomenon of psychic numbing to discuss how people respond to mass atrocities.
"[13][14] According to Paul Slovic,[15] A single child fallen down a well or dying of starvation stirs our hearts and moves our hands (and wallets) to action.
Such compassion fade (i.e., decreases in helping behavior or support for it) has been widely documented in the humanitarian domain and is troubling for at least three reasons.
Third, it suggests that confronting large-scale humanitarian and (perhaps) environmental crises—from mass starvation to climate change—may not only involve overcoming political and economic hurdles but also insidious psychological ones as well.Compassion fade, coined by psychologist Paul Slovic, is the tendency of people to experience a decrease in empathy as the number of people in need of aid increase.
Within the compassion fade theory, people tend to be influenced by:[8][1] The concept of compassion fade was introduced in 1947 through a statement commonly attributed to Joseph Stalin (but originally coined by Kurt Tucholsky in 1925 [16]) “the death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic.”[13] Traditional economic and psychological theory of choice is based on the assumption that preferences are determined by the objective valuation of an item.
Research in the 1960s and 1970s by psychologists Paul Slovic and Sarah Litchfield first looked at the emotional mechanisms in risk-assessment and developed the theory of preference construction, people tend to unequally weigh possible alternatives when making a decision.
[18] It explains how valuation of lives are cognitively perceived: each life decreases in marginal value as the number of victims increase.
In the early 2000s, research by behavioural economist Daniel Kahneman found that people have different emotional and cognitive reactions to numerical information.
[19] Similar research by Slovic in 2007 demonstrated people's emotional responses decreased as the number of lives increase which led to the development of Compassion fade.
[13][17] Compassion fade may especially be observed through individuals' reluctance to help when faced with mass crises, as a response to the number of victims involved in an event is determined by the balancing of self-interest and the concern for others.
The increasing marginal decrease in emotional response to the number of lives at risk is the foundation for the theory of compassion fade.
[17] The most common explanation for compassion fade is the use of a mental shortcut called the 'affect heuristic', which causes people to make decisions based on emotional attachments to a stimulus.
Psychological research into choice theory found that vivid mental stimuli plays a large part in processing information.
A large number of victims is more difficult to picture so it becomes more depersonalised causing the individual to feel apathetic and empathy to stretch thin.
[21] Studies on cognitive biases categorise this tendency as a "heuristic" to explain that people make decisions based on how easily the information is to process.
[2] Similar studies have demonstrated when an individual is presented with a number of single victims in a group they tend to experience less empathetic concern towards any member.
An experiment conducted by Vastfjall and Slovic in 2014 found people who did not regulate emotions experienced a decreased effect of compassion fade.
[21] Similar research on charitable showed that individuals that were able to more effectively process information experienced stronger emotional responses which led to higher donations.
[17] Compassion fade can be caused by exposure to a seemingly incessant stream of fundraisers or beggars ("it's never enough"), as well as the knowledge that some of them are in fact fraudsters and the money donated is likely to be misappropriated.
Compassion fade was believed to be correlated with intelligence; however, studies have shown numerical literacy and ability to think rationally is more influential on the individual's empathetic concern.
[23] Compassion fade concerns an individual's ability to understand statistics in order to develop a mental image and attach meaning to the data leading to a stronger response.
[17] Similar research concluded that people with greater ability to think rationally should experience a more linear relationship between number of victims and valuations.
[15] This shows how when participants are led to decide as an emotional response, as the non-environmentalist did, compared to those who already had substantial knowledge there is more evidence of compassion fade.
[31] In the early 2000s, research by behavioural economist Daniel Kahneman found that people have different emotional and cognitive reactions to numerical information.
[19] Similar research by Slovic in 2007 demonstrated people's emotional responses decreased as the number of lives increase which led to the development of Compassion fade.
In her book, European Foreign Conflict Reporting: A Comparative Analysis of Public News, Emma Heywood outlined the ways in which mass tragedies are presented, which can determine the amount of compassionate responses elicited.
Instead compassion values are sidelined and potential opportunities to dwell on victim coverage are replaced by images of fighting and violence.Compassion fade is illustrated by the reluctance to respond to crises in a global scale affecting large numbers of people.
[21] Other researchers[37][38] who also did studies included measures of three alternative explanations for the collapse of compassion: psychological distance, diffusion of responsibility, and success in helping the victims.
A two-way between-subjects analysis of variance (ANOVA) was conducted to examine the effects of help request and number of victims on compassion.
This can be further explained by saying that people actively suppress compassion when they think it might be overwhelming; this means that humans respond to the suffering of others based on their own self-interest.