Who's Counting: Pictures, Statistics and Genocide

March 4, 2007 — -- At the annual meeting last month of the American Association for Advancement of Science, Paul Slovic, a psychology professor at the University of Oregon, recommended a review and overhaul of the 1948 Genocide Convention. He offered two related reasons. The first is that it has been completely ineffective, and the second is that it doesn't accord well with our human tendency to be moved by dramatic individual tragedies and unmoved by mass killings.

The sentiment is not new. Stalin famously noted, "One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic."

What is new are a couple of experiments that elucidate this unfortunate tendency. Slovic remarks, "We have to understand what it is in our makeup -- psychologically, socially, politically and institutionally -- that has allowed genocide to go unabated for a century. If we don't answer that question and use the answer to change things, we will see another century of horrible atrocities around the world."

An important ingredient in our makeup is that we respond more emotionally to individuals than we do to groups, even small ones.

One Slovic study (done with colleagues Daniel Vastfjäll and Ellen Peters) focused on respondents who were shown a picture of a starving African girl along with text detailing her individual plight. A second group of respondents was shown a picture of a starving African boy with accompanying text, and a third group was shown a picture with the children together and accompanying text describing their situation.

The researchers made some measure of the sympathy each photo elicited and of the amount of money people were willing to donate to the girl alone, to the boy alone, or to both. The individual photos and text elicited approximately equal sympathy and donations, but the joint photo and text elicited less.

Even if the number of people in a group is only two, it seems that our capacity to feel begins to decline. Other studies show it declines more precipitously for groups of five or 10, and the difference in our responses to, say, 57 or 58 deaths is indistinguishable.