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...
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