Mick Hartley

There’s something about this kind of article that annoys me. Written by Paul Slovic, a professor of psychology, it’s looking at people’s response to genocide and mass murder. So, it claims to be looking at these questions from a scientific perspective: to be telling us something significant about our responses to human tragedy. But, beyond the familiar cliches about how we’ll rush to help a suffering individual, but not to help 100,000 suffering individuals, there’s really nothing there at all.

Consider this statement:

Psychologists have found that the statistics of mass murder or genocide—no matter how large the numbers—do not convey the true meaning of such atrocities.

What on earth does that mean? What is the true meaning of mass murder? If it’s saying that a statistic doesn’t purvey the full horror of the reality, well of course it doesn’t. Whoever thought it did? Reading the headline “Twenty thousand dead in earthquake” doesn’t have the same impact as watching someone being crushed to death under a collapsing wall and multiplying the effect twenty thousand times. Similarly with press stories: the statement “a man was killed in a car crash” doesn’t convey the full horror of what really happened to Mr Adrian Smith, financial consultant, father of Jane and Mark, husband to Fiona, who suffered multiple contusions when his car was in collision with another on the A302 just outside of Barnstaple…the broken limbs, the smashed windscreen, the body slumped forward in the seat, the blood dripping from the head wound, the glazed eyes, the devastation of his family, a life – just like yours, just like mine – cut short in its prime. Of course statistics or bald statements of fact don’t convey the true meaning. And that bit about “psychologists have found” – what right have psychologists to claim for themselves something so completely bloody obvious? I mean, have these people no shame?

Then there’s this experiment:

A recent study I conducted with Deborah Small of the University of Pennsylvania and George Loewenstein of Carnegie Mellon University found that donations to aid a starving 7-year-old child in Africa declined sharply when her image was accompanied by a statistical summary of the millions of needy children like her in other African countries. The numbers appeared to interfere with people’s feelings of compassion toward the young victim.

The assumption is that people are behaving irrationally, but what’s irrational about that? Your donation could make a difference to an individual, but to have the sheer overwhelming scale of the problem pointed out to you is inevitably going to dampen your enthusiasm.

Anyway, this isn’t really a question of human psychology in isolation as conceived by these academics: culture and politics determine our reactions. Why, to take a topical example, was slavery considered perfectly acceptable throughout most of human history, but at the end of the Eighteenth century, first in Britain and then elsewhere, came to be seen as a monstrous crime against other human beings?

As for Darfur, which is the ostensible spur for the whole dreary article, again there are political and cultural reasons why there’s a lot of talk but precious little action. It’s not psychology which is going to help us here: we don’t need, as Slavic suggests, to look at our “psychological deficiencies”, to “re-examine this human failure”. It’s about politics.

Mind you, if you look at the comments to Jonathan Freedland’s article at CiF yesterday (not something I’d recommend, to be honest), you may well come to the conclusion that a little psychology might help.