If every life counts equally, saving a hundred lives should matter a hundred times as much as saving one. Feelings don’t work that way. Psychic numbing is the name for the gap: concern fails to keep pace with the number of people suffering, and past a point it can fall.
The idea
Robert J. Lifton coined the term for the turning off of feeling that let rescue workers keep functioning after Hiroshima. In a 2007 paper the psychologist Paul Slovic used it more broadly, for the pattern in which emotional response shrinks as the number of victims grows, leading to apathy. The paper takes its title from a line attributed to Mother Teresa: “If I look at the mass I will never act.”
Slovic argued that people value lives along a psychophysical curve, the way they perceive other quantities: each additional life registers less than the one before. Few people would feel any difference between saving 87 lives and saving 88. Applied to atrocities, he argued, the pattern helps explain why the world largely stood by as about 800,000 people were killed in Rwanda in roughly 100 days. Statistics about mass killing, however large, fail to produce the feeling that drives action.
Compassion fade
The effect may start very early. In studies published in 2014, Daniel Västfjäll, Paul Slovic, Marcus Mayorga and Ellen Peters found that feelings of compassion, and in some studies donations, were greatest for a single child in need and began to decline with the second endangered life. The decline reversed when several people were presented as one unit, such as a family. Some of the studies used real money and some used hypothetical choices.
Related findings, such as the identifiable victim effect, are now being tested again, and at least one prominent replication found no effect. How strong and reliable each finding is remains an open research question.
Why it matters for the system
A charity system that moves money through human attention inherits the limits of human attention. If concern falls as need grows, the largest problems will draw the least feeling per person affected, and the deepest ones, which are often abstract and statistical, the least of all. This is part of the Story Bias, and a reason the Symptom Trap is plausible.
Knowing about the bias does not switch it off. Can a story make people feel the size of a problem rather than one face? Formats worth testing include stories of whole communities, visualizations of scale and stories about sources rather than symptoms. That is Open Problem 7, Story Without Bias.