One of the high points of the conference I'm attending here in
Melbourne was a presentation by Paul Slovic of the University of Oregon
(and president of Decision Research Group). A leading researcher in the
field of risk perception, Dr. Slovic has been one of the pioneers in
the study of psychological heuristics and how they determine how humans
respond in risky situations. In his talk titled The More Who Die, The Less We Care: Psychic Numbing and Genocide,
Dr. Slovic focused on the genocides of the past century and the human
failure to intervene when the lives of countless others are in danger.
He also dealt with a strange quirk of human psychology: that we are
far more likely to act to save one person than we are to save
thousands.
While every instance of mass murder is different, the tendency to
downplay or simply ignore deaths happening in distant countries seems
remarkably consistent. Not only
has this happened during the Nazi Holocaust, but also more recently n
the former Yugoslavia, Cambodia, Rwanda, as well as today in Darfur. At the
same time, media stories of individuals in distress are
disproportionately more likely to stir us into helping while larger crises are overlooked.
Failure to intervene, or even to protest, genocidal acts occurring in other parts of the world has been a common feature in the foreign policy of many Western countries. As journalist Samantha Power noted in her book, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide in discussing US response to 20th century instances of genocide, "No U.S. president has ever suffered politically for his indifference to its occurrence. It is thus no coincidence that genocide rages on."
The United States is far from the only country where this type of lapse occurs (such as with the deaths currently happening in Darfur) and as new atrocities break out in other places, Although the United Nations formally adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide in 1948 (which was later ratified by more than 140 nations), it has never been invoked to prevent an attack or avoid a massacre. The Darfur example demonstrates the failure of national and international foreign policy
Behavioural research studies have consistently shown the numbing effect that large numbers can have in our culture. In one study that Dr. Slovic discussed, research participants were fond to be more likely to donate money to provide clean water to save 4,500 refugees in a moderately sized camp of 11,000 than they were to save the same number of refugees in a camp of 250,000 or more. The tendency of moral intuition to blind us to massive loss of life remains a dangerous liability in an era when such atrocities can only continue. This problem is also apparent when we ignore issues such as anthropogenic global warming and extinctions of plant and animal species caused by human activity.
The emotional disconnection that we experience due to being presented with large numbers of victims can be partially overcome with the use of visual images of individual victims, narratives describing their plight, and putting names to faces to prevent the depersonalization that often accompanies news stories of atrocities. Dr. Slovic and his colleagues also recommend that international and domestic law should require officials to provide public deliberation to justify decisions to act or ignore new episodes of genocide as they occur. To do otherwise means allowing the practice of genocide to continue into the future.
To download Dr. Slovic's paper, "If I Look at the Mass I Will Never Act": Psychic numbing and genocide.
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