Why The More Who Die, The Less We Care

Un-numbing and growing our capacity to face atrocity at scale

Hello friends.

I’m coming to you this week calm and rested. My personal July has been very sweet. We pick both kids up from camp this Sunday. While we’ve missed them, we knew they were having the time of their lives and frankly, so did we!

Adam and I traveled, spent time with dear friends of decades standing, passed long days outside, danced in our bare feet, ate delicious food, swam in oceans, rivers, ponds, and clear mountain lakes. And I was able to take a solo trip for book research, meeting and connecting deeply with the brilliant and inspiring Panu Pihkala and Maria Ojala.

As I’ve been picking wild blueberries in the woods, children have been starving to death because of the deliberate actions and indifference of my own and other governments.

My former NPR colleague, Anas Baba, is in Gaza, where he has lost a third of his body weight. His first-person account of the travesty of the new “aid” system operated by the Israeli army and US contractors, “Knives, bullets and thieves: the quest for food in Gaza,” is a must read. This is the image that has stuck in my mind.

People are pale and weak. They walk on the street supporting themselves by grabbing onto walls and fences, or they walk together in groups to support each other. Women and children faint in the street.

In South Sudan, as in other countries, there is also a terrible famine, worsened by the elimination of USAID.

As part of that willful destruction, our government will soon burn 500 tons of emergency food rather than distribute it to hungry people in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Lately, I’ll be honest, I am having a harder and harder time even reading these stories, let alone responding. I click past the headlines shamefully fast. And I know I’m not the only one.

But recently I had an incredible, deep, and wise conversation with an 87-year-old scholar which helped illuminate my reaction, and hint at how we might make a different choice.

My friend Elizabeth Svoboda, a writer you should know about, introduced me to Paul Slovic, professor of psychology at the University of Oregon. He is a contemporary and collaborator of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, the coauthors of the massive bestseller Thinking, Fast And Slow, the latter of whom won the Nobel Prize for his insights into human behavior, making him the “grandfather of behavioral economics.”

Perhaps Slovic is less famous than Kahneman and Tversky because he’s focused on morality.

For 66 years, he told me, he’s been exploring an urgent question:

“Why we, who value individual lives so greatly, turn a blind eye to genocide and other large-scale abuses over and over and over, since World War 2, when we vowed never again.”

“And it's happening as we speak. Incredible abuses of human populations, as well as nature, and we blithely go about our business not paying attention to it.”

Slovic has calculated, through a series of experiments, what he has called “the deadly arithmetic of compassion.”

In an emblematic set of studies, they showed people a photograph of a starving seven-year-old girl named Rokia, and invited them to donate to help her. Between 30 and 40% did so.

In a second condition, with her photograph, they would include a statistic: “7 million children like Rokia are starving.”

Donations dropped by half.

Or as Slovic puts it: the more who die, the less we care.

What explains this upsetting paradox?

Slovic has arrived at two concepts, which he’s dubbed the “psychophysics of morality” and “psychic numbing.”

Drawings of the structure of the eye from the 16th and 17th century (Source)

Psychophysics describes the relationship between stimuli and sensations. Our sight and hearing are customized to make fine distinctions with small amounts of input. We survived in the forest by listening for small rustles and making out faint shapes in the dimness.

But sensitive systems quickly max out. That’s why a 200-watt bulb doesn’t appear twice as bright as a 100-watt bulb, and why we can’t stare directly at the sun.

Similarly, Slovic posits, our hearts evolved to care deeply about a small number of known individual others.

My religious tradition, Judaism, teaches that the value of a single human life is effectively infinite. Each person is a whole world. But how do you feel the size of a thousand infinities?

Most people would take big risks to save one other life, but we aren’t wired to feel the difference between five and six other lives, let alone between 10,000 and 100,000.

“Our feelings are very sophisticated, but they're innumerate,” Slovic puts it. “They don't deal with numbers or with scope or with repetition. They quickly flatten out. They don't have capacity.”

The psychophysics principle would explain why we donate the same amount to Rokia, or to a million Rokias. But why would we give less? Why would we pay less attention?

Because, Slovic says, learning about large numbers of people suffering makes us feel helpless and useless, and we prefer to feel good instead.

“We donate to people in need because they need help and we feel good about doing it. That's the spark that motivates you to help.

If your attention is drawn instead to all the people you're not helping you feel bad. That wipes out the good feeling you have about helping that one child.”

Slovic and his collaborators describe what happens to us when we look at that big number, or when you read story after story about desperate, starving people being mowed down by soldiers as they try to reach food, as “psychic numbing.”

“If you dwell on how horrible things are, this is very distressing emotionally. So you go out of sight, out of mind.”

It occured to me that psychic numbing is like the inverse of awe. Ten days ago I was traversing a via ferrata in the Swiss Alps, dangling from a metal cable on a cliff a thousand feet up, sprayed by a waterfall. I felt my smallness in relation to the vastness; my momentary blip of existence in relation to the epochs that are the lifetime of a mountain; my physical fragility and weakness in contrast to the enduring stone.

Psychic numbing is a darker version of that vertigo: a negative feeling of our individual smallness in relationship to the vastness of evil and suffering in the world.

But remember, we are also wired to spot the smallest flicker of light in the deepest darkness.

Slovic says that our compassion can be recovered. It just takes a little more time and attention.

“In order to feel properly about large-scale problems, you have to focus your attention on them and delve into them. Think slowly and deeply about the individual reality beneath the surface of the numbers. You have to work at it. It's not that we can't do it.”

Learning about the psychophysics of morality and the widespread phenomenon of psychic numbing helped me feel less guilty and frozen about my reaction to all the disturbing images surrounding us right now.

It helped me take a breath and make a different choice. I don’t have to read every story that is published; it might open my heart to learn more detail about just one or two people. (Molly Shah, on Bluesky, shares individual GoFundMes of families in Gaza almost every day).

And while you work to feel more for the people who are suffering: Just help them. In Jewish teaching the word for giving to the poor translates as “righteousness,” not “charity.” In other words, it’s a matter of justice, not sentiment.

I can’t save all the children who are dying in Gaza or South Sudan, but I can donate to the Palestinian led- Sameer project or to Save the Children in South Sudan and buy a few meals that can help a few people for a few more days. And I can show up with organizations that are raising awareness about both. it’s less important how that makes me feel and more important to let them live.

There is a Global Day of Action for Gaza today, July 25. And Satyam, the Palestinian peace center which I visited in March, is holding an ongoing hunger strike with daily programming over Zoom.

Catch me online

I’ll be talking about one of my favorite topics, families and healthy media use, on Monday July 28 at 2:30ET with Campaign for Grade-Level Reading , in a session co-sponsored by New America focused on the guardrails & guidelines needed to help families, educators, & community leaders navigate an increasingly complex digital landscape.

Featuring voices from education, pediatrics, policy, + tech, this conversation will go beyond fear-based narratives to offer research-based insights, real-world reflections, & actionable strategies for communities.

Register here: https://bit.ly/44yT04C