How much of Japan's suffering can people comprehend?
The uncomfortable truth is that the limit is extremely low
The American author Annie Dillard summed up well the difficulty of empathising with hordes of other people. "There are 1,198,500,000 people alive now in China," she wrote. "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."
I came across that honest, wise remark this weekend, while watching the footage from Japan. The two did not sit well with each other. When a big disaster strikes, either here or abroad, politicians and journalists alike work on the basis that the greater the misery, the more they, and we, should care. David Cameron was working to that logic when he said yesterday that "our thoughts are with the Japanese people". And after reading the reports of 10,000-plus deaths and nuclear warnings, or seeing the photos of submerged towns and stranded survivors, who could disagree?
Yet the uncomfortable truth is that the academic research suggests Dillard is right. However horrifying the pictures, however moving the reports, there's a limit to how much suffering people can take on board – and it's extremely low.
The bigger the numbers of fatalities and injuries, the harder it is for audiences to comprehend them. This law of diminishing returns doesn't just apply to natural disasters, but to other varieties of misery – from oil spills to famines and genocides.
"Psychic numbing" is how the University of Oregon psychologist Paul Slovic refers to this. To illustrate what he means, he sometimes sketches two graphs. The first shows how we might believe we value human lives, with the line going straight up along a diagonal: the more lives at stake, the more attention we pay. The second shows the reality, as Slovic sees it. Here the line starts off very high, but then drops all the way down: we get very worked up when one or two lives are at stake, but then the numbers begin to blur and we tune out.
The result is that humans will often throw money at one sad story – even when it doesn't involve a human. Researchers sometimes quote the story of how more than $48,000 was raised in 2002 to save a dog stranded on a ship adrift near Hawaii. Charities know this impulse too, which is why they often put a single child on their envelopes and posters.
"Perhaps the "blurring" of individuals begins at two," Slovic writes in one of his papers. "It leads to apathy and inaction, consistent with what is seen repeatedly in response to mass murder and genocide."
You might think that the way around this would be for campaigners or charity workers to highlight one story of distress and then use statistics to show how widespread that particular famine or drought is. But the evidence suggests not.
A few years ago, Deborah Small led a team of academics in a study of how people made donations. In one trial they showed subjects a battery of horrifying statistics about food shortages in Africa; in another they focused on Rokia, a seven-year old girl from Mali at risk of starvation; finally, they combined the two. People were most willing to give money to Rokia, but when confronted with statistics in any form their interest tailed off.
Our ability to turn huge instances of human suffering into abstractions becomes even more pronounced when the disaster in question – whether a tsunami or a drought – is one we have never encountered. I have written here before about research done by Namika Sagara and Christopher Olivola where respondents from Indonesia and India (countries where gigantic losses of human life are comparatively more frequent) were less sensitive to modest fatalities than counterparts from America and Japan – but were far better able to comprehend really big losses of life.
These studies might strike you as rather dispiriting, and I wouldn't disagree. But there is a lesson that can be drawn from them.
The height of a crisis of any kind is when prime ministers and presidents are most willing to vow that this disaster must never happen again. Think of Gordon Brown swearing after Lehman Brothers collapsed in 2008 that he and his fellow leaders would "prevent a crisis such as this ever happening again". In the wake of Deepwater Horizon, Barack Obama made an almost identical promise – that he would "prevent a similar disaster from happening again".
One implication of Slovic's work is that these vows should be made reality as soon as possible, and turned into law or embodied in an institution. It is no good relying on the salutary example – because that way memories fade and mistakes get repeated.
In his classic on the Wall Street crash of 1929, John Kenneth Galbraith describes how shares crashed, investors were wiped out and banks collapsed in their thousands. This was one financial disaster that led to lots of vows of never again. Yet his passage on the lessons from that cataclysm is curiously ambivalent: "With time and the dimming of memory, the immunity wears off. A recurrence becomes possible. Nothing would have induced Americans to launch a speculative adventure in the stock market in 1935. By 1955 [the time of publication] the chances are very much better."
He concludes: "When people are cautious, questioning, misanthropic, suspicious or mean, they are immune to speculative enthusiasms."
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment