Why We Care Less When More People Die

The genocides in the Middle East, Europe, and Africa have taken thousands of lives this year. But the world's reaction has been quite silent. This episode explores the psychology behind why people do not care about genocides. More than that, we discuss how we can learn to care about the people affected by genocides. The lesson learned here can impact millions of people across the globe.

Episode Transcript

Hi, we're back with episode two and today we're going to talk about why we don't care about genocide. So as of summer of 2024, in Sudan there's been an ongoing genocide with more than 16,000 people dead and in Palestine more than 38,000 people dead. But the world doesn't seem to be reacting proportionally to that number. So we would think logically that the more number of people that die, the more we care. But actually we have a psychological bug that makes us care less for the more number of people that die.

We don't care about the genocide in Palestine because of a psychological phenomenon called psychic numbing. So psychic numbing is this idea that if we have one person that dies, we care a lot about them. But the more and more people that die, the less we care about them, the more detached and desensitized we become. So there was a study where they gave participants a picture of one child in need and asked them to donate. They also then gave a picture of eight children in need and asked them to donate. People actually donated less to eight children than they did to one children, even though there's greater need with eight children.

So there's an evolutionary theory behind psychic numbing. For thousands of years, we used to live in small groups of people, so we developed a kind of moral emotional intuition about when a few members in our group were hurt or needed help. But now we live amongst billions of people, so it's hard for our mind to comprehend what thousands or millions of people in need actually look like. So our moral intuition hasn't evolved fast enough with the globalization of the world, and is actually having a problem now understanding what it means when millions of people are in need.

So there's an adjacent concept to psychic numbing called pseudo-inefficacy, and it's this idea that for the greater number of people who die, the less we feel like we can help, which is untrue.

But both psychic numbing and pseudo-inefficacy affects how we react to genocides, which eventually impacts how states respond or don't respond to genocides. For example, there's a terrible track record for the Bush with the Darfur genocide and now Biden with the Palestinian genocide.

There seems to be a connection between how much we react and what states do. For example, there is a convention called the Convention of the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which was passed in 1948 in the UN, and it has recently been invoked to address both the Ukraine and Palestinian genocide. And Sudan, on the other hand, it was never invoked for. So both Ukraine and Palestine have been getting a good amount of attention while Sudan hasn't.

So the real key takeaway here is we should try to push past psychic numbing, educate ourselves on all the genocides that are happening, and push our states to do something about and hopefully stop these genocides. So there are a couple tools you can use to combat psychic numbing. One of them is to follow organizations like Genocide Watch. They publish a very succinct report of all the genocides happening around the world. It'll keep you informed.

Second is to reframe information. Instead of thinking of a statistic like 800,000 dead for every 100 days, you can see it as one death for every 11 seconds. Another thing you can do is to add imagery. So there was an organization that wanted to bring more attention to the number of gun and it's 38,000, so they brought out 38,000 pairs of shoes and set them outside of the capital to give people an understanding of what that number actually looks like.

And lastly, and maybe most effectively, you can understand the story of a single victim and empathize with them. That is easier for our minds to empathize with than understanding statistics. So the end goal of all of this is to overcome psychic numbing to push for change. because we can only fight for the things we are moved by. That is it for today. Thank you for listening, watching, and please subscribe!