Irrational Economist_ Making Decisions in a Dangerous World - Erwann Michel-Kerjan [19]
FIGURE 4.4 Mean Donations
Source: Reprinted from Small et al. (2006), copyright 2006, with permission from Elsevier.
THE COLLAPSE OF COMPASSION
American writer Annie Dillard reads in her newspaper the headline “Head Spinning Numbers Cause Mind to Go Slack.” She writes of “compassion fatigue” and asks, “At what number do other individuals blur for me?”2
An answer to Dillard’s question is beginning to emerge from behavioral research. Studies by social psychologists find that a single individual, unlike a group, is viewed as a psychologically coherent unit. This leads to more extensive processing of information and stronger impressions about individuals than about groups. Consistent with this, a study in Israel found that people tend to feel more distress and compassion and to provide more aid when considering a single victim than when considering a group of eight victims.3 A follow-up study in Sweden found that people felt less compassion and donated less aid toward a pair of victims than to either individual alone.4 Perhaps the blurring that Annie Dillard asked about begins for groups as small as two people.
The insensitivity to lifesaving portrayed by the psychophysical-numbing model is unsettling. But the studies just described suggest an even more disturbing psychological tendency. Our capacity to feel is limited. To the extent that valuation of lifesaving depends on feelings driven by attention or imagery, it might follow the function shown in Figure 4.5, where the emotion or affective feeling is greatest at N = 1 but begins to decline at N = 2 and collapses at some higher value of N that becomes simply “a statistic.” Whereas Robert J. Lifton coined the term psychic numbing to describe the “turning off” of feeling that enabled rescue workers to function during the horrific aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing,5 Figure 4.5 depicts a form of psychic numbing that is not beneficial. Rather, it leads to apathy and inaction, consistent with what is seen repeatedly in response to mass murder and genocide.
FIGURE 4.5 A Model Depicting Psychic Numbing: The Collapse of Compassion—When Valuing the Saving of Lives
THE FAILURE OF MORAL INTUITION
Thoughtful deliberation takes effort. Fortunately evolution has equipped us with sophisticated cognitive and perceptual mechanisms that can guide us through our daily lives efficiently, with minimal need for “deep thinking.”
Consider how we typically deal with risk. Long before we had invented probability theory, risk assessment, and decision analysis, there were such faculties as intuition, instinct, and gut feeling, honed by experience, to tell us whether an animal was safe to approach or water was safe to drink. As life became more complex and humans gained more control over their environment, analytic ways of thinking evolved to boost the rationality of our experiential reactions. Beyond the question of how water looks and tastes, we now can look to toxicology and analytic chemistry to tell us whether it is safe to drink. But we can still use our feelings as well, an easier path.
As with risk, the natural and easy way to deal with moral issues is to rely on our intuitions: “How bad is it?” Well, how bad does it feel? We can also apply reason and logical analysis to determine right and wrong, as our legal system attempts to do. But, as Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist at the University of Virginia, has demonstrated, moral intuition comes first and usually dominates moral judgment unless we make an effort to critique and, if necessary, override our intuitive feelings.6
Unfortunately, moral