“If I Look at the Mass,I Will
Never Act”
Psychic Numbing and Genocide
Paul Slovic
pslovic@uoregon.edu
Princeton Colloquium
April 20,2007
To avoid further disasters, we need political
restraint on a world scale. But politics is not the
whole story. We have experienced the results of
technology in the service of the destructive side of
human psychology. Something needs to be done
about this fatal combination. The means for
expressing cruelty and carrying out mass killing
have been fully developed. It is too late to stop the
technology. It is to the psychology that we should
now turn.
Jonathan Glover, Humanity, 2001, p. 144
If I look at the mass, I will never act.
If I look at one, I will.
Mother Teresa
Mother Teresa’s observations capture a
powerful and deeply unsettling insight
into human nature.
Most people are caring and will exert
great effort to rescue “the one” whose
needy plight comes to their attention.
These same good people however, often
become numbly indifferent to the plight of
“the one” who is “one of many” in a much
greater problem.
Why does this occur?
The answer will help us answer a related
question. Why do good people ignore mass
murder and genocide?
The Problem of Genocide:
“For sixty plus years, since the liberation
of the Nazi death camps, we’ve said ‘never
again.’ Since then we’ve had mass
exterminations of human beings… in
China, Cambodia, Nigeria, Ethiopia,
Kosovo, and Rwanda. Each time we tut tut,
but… we do nothing. ‘Never again’ has
become ‘again and again.’
Michael Reynolds(2005)
“And now there’s Darfur, a region of
Sudan, where the Janjaweed gangs, with
the support of the corrupt national
government, are carrying out yet another
genocide. In a few years there’ll be an
HBO movie on Darfur. We’ll vow ‘never
again,’ once again, but the world being as
it is, there will be another genocide under
way even as we engage in the ritual of
mild self-flagellation for Darfur.
“Again and again.”
Michael Reynolds, Center Line, June 7,
2005
Every episode of mass murder is unique and
raises unique obstacles to intervention. But the
repetitiveness of such atrocities, ignored by
powerful people and nations, and by the general
public, calls for explanations that may reflect
some fundamental deficiency in our humanity—a
deficiency that, once identified, might possibly be
overcome.
My talk examines one fundamental mechanism
that may play a role in many, if not all, episodes
of mass-murder neglect. This mechanism
involves affect, the capacity to experience
feelings that combines with reasoned analysis to
guide our judgments, decisions, and actions.
Recommended Reading:
Genocide: A Recurring Phenomenon
Armenia (1915)
Ukraine (1932-33)
Nazi Germany/Holocaust (World War II)
Bangladesh (1971)
Cambodia (1975-1979)
Countries in the former Yugoslavia (1990s)
Rwanda (1994)
Zimbabwe (2000)
Congo (Today)
Darfur (Today)
? (Tomorrow)
Rwanda (1994)
800,000 people murdered in 100 days
about 8,000 a day
while the world watched and did nothing
'A tragedy of monumental proportions' What if it
happened here?
Gunman kills 32 at Virginia Tech shooting before killing
himself
By: Trevor Davis | News Reporter
Media Credit: Alan Kim | The Roanoke Times/The Associated Press
University and emergency officials say the University
community is prepared to handle a incident similar to
Monday's Virginia Tech shooting in which a gunman killed
32 people and himself.
Since February,2003 the Sudanese government,
working through the Janjaweed Militia has destroyed
more than 1000 villages in Darfur,murdered as
many as 400,000 people from those villages and
driven some 2.5 million into refugee camps where
their lives are in grave danger.
The world has done almost nothing in response!
WHY?
Burning villages in Darfur
Massacre list Darfur
War in Sudan? Not Where the Oil Wealth Flows
Evelyn Hockstein for The New York Times
As one of the world’s worst atrocities unfolds in Darfur, some 600 miles to the west, young women enjoy the good life at the
Ozone Café in Khartoum, including ice cream and outdoor air-conditioning.
Evelyn Hockstein for The New York Times
A sign of prosperity: Khartoum residents shop to piped-in Sudanese elevator music at the Hypermarket, a superstore in the
city’s first real mall.
Evelyn Hockstein for The New York Times
New investment in Sudan is literally redrawing Khartoum’s skyline. A 24-story, five-star hotel being built by the Libyan
government on the banks of the Nile is nearly finished.
Evelyn Hockstein for The New York Times
Sudanese walk past old cars and taxis as a sign advertises a sedan inside Khartoum's new BMW dealership.
Why do we ignore mass murder and genocide?
MANY ANSWERS:
• Lack of leadership
• Dangerous, costly, difficult
• Racism
• Distance
• Lack of information
• Lack of compassion
• Ostrich effect
• Diffusion of responsibility
• Feelings of inefficacy ---drop in the bucket effect
• Available information fails to convey affect and emotion
Why do we ignore mass murder and genocide?
Leadership Problems:
but
Darfur: Bush
Rwanda: Clinton
WWII Holocaust: Roosevelt
“No U.S. president has ever made genocide prevention a
priority, and no U.S. president has ever suffered
politically for his indifference to its occurrence. It is thus
no coincidence that genocide rages on.”
- Samantha Power (A Problem from Hell)
Why do we ignore mass murder and genocide?
Difficult, Dangerous, & Costly:
but
even minimal, safe, easy actions are not taken:
e.g. bombing the radio stations in Rwanda
e.g. developing a continuum of possible actions
to consider taking
Genocide is real, but we don’t feel that reality!
“…the atrocities that were known remained abstract
and remote… Because the savagery of genocide so
defies our everyday experience, many of us failed to
wrap our minds around it. Bystanders were thus able
to retreat to the ‘twilight between knowing and not
knowing’.
- Samantha Power (A Problem from Hell)
The News Media Ignore Genocide
Lack of media coverage in 2004
Do you know the name of the president
of Sudan ,who is responsible for the Genocide
in Darfur during the past three and one half
years ?
Have you ever seen his picture?
Omar al Bashir
Sudanese Leader of the Darfur
Genocide
Rwanda (1994)
“I encourage . . . Scholars to continue to study this human
tragedy and to contribute to our growing understanding of
the genocide.
If we do not understand what happened, how will we ever
ensure it does not happen again?”
Roméo Dallaire
U.N. Commander in Rwanda
How Should We Value the
Saving of Human Lives?
A normative model:
Every human life is of equal value
How Should We Value the
Saving of Human Lives?
Another normative model: Large losses
threaten the viability of the group or society
But our actions in the face of mass murder
do not follow either of these normative models.
Our feelings overide our analytic judgments!
There is no dearth of evidence in
everyday life that people apprehend
reality in two fundamentally different
ways, one variously labeled intuitive,
automatic, natural, non-verbal,
narrative, and experiential, and the
other analytical, deliberative, verbal,
and rational.
Seymour Epstein; 1994, p. 710
System
System 11
System22
System
Intuitive Judgment is like Perception
“From its earliest days, the research that
Tversky and I conducted was guided by the
idea that intuitive judgments occupy a
position—perhaps corresponding to
evolutionary history—between the automatic
operations of perception and the deliberate
operations of reasoning.”
-Daniel Kahneman (2003)
Process and Content in Two Cognitive Systems
Source: Kahneman, 2003
Information
Affect
Meaning
• Affect conveys meaning upon information
• Without affect, information lacks meaning and
will not be used in judgment and decision making
• Affect is a key ingredient of rational behavior
• Affect sometimes leads to poor decision making
So how does reliance on our feelings
(using system 1)lead us to value lifesaving?
Research identifies two descriptive models
-psychophysical model
-collapse model
There are 1,198,500,000 people alive now
in China. To get a feel for what this
means, simply take yourself – in all your
singularity, importance, complexity, and
love – and multiply by 1,198,500,000.
See? Nothing to it.
-Annie Dillard, For the Time Being (1999)
Insensitivity to the Value of Human Life
I am deeply moved if I see one man suffering and
would risk my life for him. Then I talk
impersonally about the possible pulverization of
our big cities, with a hundred million dead. I am
unable to multiple one man’s suffering by a
hundred million.
– Albert Szent Gyorgi
Figure 1. The value function from Kahneman and Tversky’s prospect
theory. According to this function, a fixed reduction in number of lives lost
() has more subjective value (’) when the starting point is a small
number (X1) than when the starting point is a large number (Y1).
A descriptive model of diminished sensitivity as
N grows large. All lives are not valued equally.
(psychophysical numbing)
Another descriptive model:The collapse of compassion.
Our capacity to feel (good or bad) is limited. Valuation
depends on feelings (the affect heuristic). Lack of
feeling (value) leads to inaction as large losses of life
occur in episodes of mass murder or genocide.
Fetherstonhaugh et al. (1997)
Result:
-The number of lives saved carries little affect.
-The proportion of lives saved carries much
feeling:
High % is good
Low % is bad
The proportion of lives saved
carries more affective meaning
than the number of lived saved
For example, in separate
evaluations there will likely be
more support for saving 80% of
100 lives at risk than saving 20%
of 1000 lives at risk.
This is because we feel little different
when contemplating(separately) the
saving of 100 lives or 1000 lives
but we feel much better about saving
80% of something than about saving
20%.
Airport Safety
Saving a percentage of 150 lives receives higher
support ratings than does saving 150 lives.
15
13.6
12.9
10.4
Mean
support
11.7
10.9
10
5
0
150
98%
95%
90%
85%
Numbers and Numbness
• Conveying only the statistics of a mass
murder or genocide, no matter how large the
numbers, fails to convey the true meaning of
such atrocities.
• The numbers represent “dry statistics” that fail
to motivate action.
One man’s death is a tragedy.
A million deaths is a statistic.
Joseph Stalin
(attributed)
But isn’t the numbing effect of
statistics well known?
I don’t believe it is.
The Mournful Math of Darfur: The Dead Don't Add Up
By Marc Lacey
The New York Times
Wednesday 18 May 2005
Is the death toll between 60,000 and 160,000, as Deputy
Secretary of State Robert B. Zoellick told reporters during a
recent trip to the region?
Or is it closer to the roughly 400,000 dead reported recently
by the Coalition for International Justice?
Those trying to tally the terror are engaging in guesswork for
a cause. They say they are trying to count the deaths to
shock the world into stopping the number from rising higher
than it already is.
“Statistics are human beings
with the tears dried off”
How might we put the tears
back on?
Answer:By communicating with
Images
Narratives
Personalized stories/faces
Iraq War Dead
University of Oregon
February,2007
Closer to Home . . .
The charity “Save the Children” knows this.
The
face
doesn’t
have
to be
human
But there may be a limit to the ability of
“faces” to prevail over numbers
Donating money to save statistical
and identified lives
•
Statistical Lives
– Food shortages in Malawi are
affecting more than 3 million
children
– In Zambia, severe rainfall
deficits have resulted in a 42
percent drop in maize production
from 2000. As a result, an
estimated 3 million Zambians
face hunger
– Four million Angolans—one
third of the population—have
been forced to flee their homes
Source: Small, Loewenstein, & Slovic (in press)
Identifiable Lives
Any money that you donate will go to
Rokia, a 7-year-old girl from Mali, Africa.
Rokia is desperately poor, and faces a
threat of severe hunger or even starvation.
Her life will be changed for the
better as a result of your financial
gift. With your support, and the
support of other caring sponsors,
Save the Children will work with
Rokia’s family and other
members of the community to
help feed her, provide her with
education, as well as basic
medical care and hygiene
education.
Donations
$3.00
$2.38
$2.50
$2.00
$1.50
$1.00
$0.50
$0.00
Identifiable life
Donations
$3.00
$2.50
$2.38
$2.00
$1.50
$1.14
$1.00
$0.50
$0.00
Identifiable life
Statistical lives
Donations
$3.00
$2.50
$2.38
$2.00
$1.50
$1.14
$1.43
$1.00
$0.50
$0.00
Identifiable life
$ to Rokia
Statistical lives
Identifiable life with
statistics
$ to Rokia
Interpretation:
Presence of statistics may have reduced
the feeling(empathy,compassion) for
Rokia,thus reducing donations to her.
But it’s not just large numbers that can interfere
with feelings.
Research shows we attend less carefully to
groups of people than we do to individuals.
We also generate less sympathy and donate
less to groups.
Children in need of cancer
therapy(Kogut & Ritov,2005)
The total amount of money needed was the
same in both conditions
• 1 child – treatment costs $300,000
• 8 children – treatment costs $300,000
Will you donate?
How much?
“The greater contribution to a single victim relative to
the group stems most likely from emotions evoked by
a single identified victim rather than from emotions
evoked by identified victims in general” (Kogut &
Ritov, in press).
“Compassion Fatigue”
“At what number do other individuals blur
for me?”
Annie Dillard
My answer: individuals may begin to blur and
compassion may begin to collapse at N=2!
Feelings and Donations Decline at N=2 !
Donations
Feelings
4.00
3.57
30
3.54
25.2
25.3
3.00
3.00
21.5
20
2.00
10
1.00
0.00
0
Rokia
Moussa
Rokia &
Moussa
Rokia
Vastfjall,Peters, &Slovic(2006)
Moussa
Rokia &
Moussa
Västfjäll, Peters, & Slovic (2006)
• Willingness to donate to
Rokia and Moussa is
less than donations to
either child individually
• Sympathetic feelings
also decline at N = 2.
• No wonder we do not
respond at N = 400,000!
• What is the psychology underlying the
collapse of compassion?
• We cannot “wrap our minds” around two
people as well as around one.
Imagery
Feeling
Helping
Attention
Research shows that
– Attention diminishes as group size increases
– Imagery is deficient with large numbers
– Feeling collapses when group size becomes large
What Might be Done About
Genocide Neglect?
In the near term--for Darfur?
In the longer term--for humanity?
For Darfur---Be Political
“It is in the realm of domestic politics that
the battle to stop genocide is lost.
American political leaders interpret
society-wide silence as an indicator of
public indifference… Potential sources of
influence — lawmakers on capital hill …
and ordinary constituents — do not
generate political pressure sufficient to
change the calculus of America’s leaders.”
Samantha Power, 2003, p. XVIII
“If every member of the house and
senate had received 100 letters from
people back home saying we have to
do something about Rwanda, when
the crisis was first developing, then I
think the response would have been
different.”
Senator Paul Simon, July, 1994
What Might be Done for Darfur
• Become informed
• Emphatically tell your congressional
delegation, Pres. Bush, and Ban Kimoon(UN) to
- stop the genocide
-get the joint UN/African Union force in place
immediately with a mandate to act
-ensure adequate funding for peacekeeping
and for delivery of humanitarian aid
What to do,contd.
• Convince the media of the importance
of relentlessly and vividly reporting the
realities of Darfur-i.e. treating mass
murder as important news!
For the Longer Term… From
Psychology to International Law
Understand the nature of moral intuitions
and their strengths and weaknesses.
Intuitions may dominate moral
judgments.
Moral Intuitions vs. Moral Arguments
Jon Haidt (2001) argues that moral intuitions (akin to System 1)
typically precede moral judgments.
Specifically:
“…moral intuition can be defined as the sudden appearance in consciousness
of a moral judgment, including an affective valence (good-bad, like-dislike)
without any conscious awareness of having gone through steps of searching,
weighing evidence, or inferring a conclusion. One sees or hears about a social
event and one instantly feels approval or disapproval” (p. 818; see also Hume,
1777/1960 for an earlier version of this argument).
Haidt, J. (2001). The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social
intuitionist approach to moral judgment. Psychological Review, 108,
814-834.
For the Longer Term…
Moral intuitions,even with tears, are not enough!
System 1 (feelings) evolved to protect us as
individuals and small groups.
System 1 is not a dependable motivator against
Genocide.We cannot trust our moral intuitions to
guide us in the face of mass murder and genocide.
Neuroimaging studies by Greene et al(2004)
support the notion that cognitive control processes
invoking deliberate moral reasoning can override
emotional /intuitive responses to achieve utilitarian
goals(e.g. maximize lifesaving).
See also Kahneman(2003).
• We thus need System2(deliberate,reasonbased,moral judgment) to create laws and
institutions that will enforce proper attention to
genocide.Note analogy to paying taxes.
• The Genocide Convention(1948) was supposed to
do this,but it has failed.Can it be rewritten and
enforced,so as to commit us to respond
appropriately to genocidal actions?Are there
institutional arrangements that can be dedicated to
combatting genocide effectively?
Roméo Dallaire, the Canadian
general in command of the
halfhearted U.N. effort to prevent
the slaughter of 800,000 Rwandans
in 1994, asks: “Are we all human,
or are some more human than
others?”
“If we believe that all humans are human, then how are we
going to prove it? It can only be proven through our actions.”
-Roméo Dallaire
“Are we all
human?”
— Dallaire, 2005