MuseumDESCRIPTION:
Paul Slovic is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Oregon and a founder and President of Decision Research. He studies human judgment, decision making and risk analysis. Paul has received many distinguished awards, among one of them, the Outstanding Contribution to Science Award from the Academy of Oregon of Science in 1995. In addition, Paul has received honorary doctorates from the Stockholm School of Economics and the University of East Anglia. Paul speaks with Jerry Fowler about a case study he conducted. He explains people’s response to mass murder and genocide versus individual tragedy.
TRANSCRIPT:
JERRY FOWLER: My guest today is Paul Slovic. He is president of Decision Research and Professor of Psychology at the University of Oregon. Paul, welcome to the program.
PAUL SLOVIC: Thank you Jerry, nice to be here.
JERRY FOWLER: Paul, you recently had an article on www.foreignpolicy.com, where you argued that people do not ignore mass killings because they lack compassion, but the statistics itself, paralyze us to into inaction. Why is that?
PAUL SLOVIC: Well, to understand that, we have to look at the way our minds process information. We have two ways of doing that. One is a kind of intuitive way that relies a lot on feelings, something in technical jargon we call affect, but it is really just feelings. The other is through reason/analysis – logic, argument, and so forth. We think that when we have statistical information that turns on our reasoning, part of the brain, it kind of interferes with our ability to connect feeling to the information. As a result, we often do not react very adequately when we see the numbers.
JERRY FOWLER: So you have heard in this article to this concept, “the Dance of Affect and Reason,” which would be the interaction of these two functions; the intuitive function and the reasoning function, so the idea is that if the reason is activated – say it shuts down the emotion - they do not work in a complimentary way?
PAUL SLOVIC: The interaction is complex and we are still trying to figure out what the nature of this dance of affect and reason is because sometimes when you think hard and deliberate about something, that actually creates feeling or affect. It does not have to shut things down, necessarily, but sometimes it does. When the numbers shut us down and when they actually get us to react more appropriately, something we are still trying to figure out, what differentiates those situations. So, conceivably if we take a moment and think hard about the numbers we are seeing, then that can generate appropriate feelings. The problem is that most of the time our moral sensibilities are led by this system of intuitive feelings. We do not invoke logic and reason as often as we kind of react quickly through our feelings.
JERRY FOWLER: Let us make this a little more complex, or not complex, but concrete – it is already complex enough. One of the experiments that you have done, from what I understand is to show people a picture of a seven year old child in Africa who is starving and comparing their response to that to people who are shown the same picture, but are also given a statistical summary of the hugeness of the problem with millions of others who suffering. What was the outcome of that?
PAUL SLOVIC: When we showed just the picture of the child, the child’s name, and the information that they were suffering from malnutrition, and gave people the opportunity to donate money that would go to this child, we got a fairly strong response. These were actual donations that were made. Then we had a condition that we did not show a child, but we just gave a statistical picture of the large numbers of the starving children in Africa and ask people to donate to an organization that will transfer the money to deal with this problem - we got a rather small response. The third condition, another group of people, we combined the two conditions. We gave the statistical summary, but then we asked the people to donate to the individual who is one of the millions, but the money would go to the individuals, with the statistics, as putting the background of size of the problem. We got a very poor response. Not much different than the statistics alone. So, bringing the numbers in seemed to depress the willingness to donate. Our interpretation of that is, in order to donate you have to make an emotional connection with the person or the cause and you can do that with when there is one child. You can kind of focus and you can then make that connection. The numbers seem to distract from our attention and weaken that emotional connection, therefore; the donations are not as great.
JERRY FOWLER: Would it make any difference whether the numbers come before the picture?
PAUL SLOVIC: I do not think so. Let us see. In the condition where we had both, they were kind of simultaneous. They were on a page that the numbers and the picture side by side. So it was not sequential, it was side by side. Now another interpretation is by putting the numbers there, one sees that the problem is really huge and that one might feel well, I can’t really make a difference on a problem that is this large. But actually, they were not asked to solve a whole problem of hunger in Africa. They were asked to help this one child, so that was the same as it was in the condition where there is only the child. You just asked to help this child. Somehow, putting numbers in the background, showing the magnitude of the problem disrupted whatever motivation there was to help the child.
JERRY FOWLER: A similar experiment that you were involved in, instead of pairing one child with numbers, you did sequences where people were exposed to one child who is needy and then a picture of two children who were needy and even that made a difference in the response.
PAUL SLOVIC: That is right. We were actually replicating a similar study that we was done in Israel where people were shown a picture of eight children who were being treated for cancer in a hospital. They were told the equivalent of 300,000 American dollars was needed to treat all eight children. People were given the opportunity to donate towards that cause. Then a second group of people were shown one of the eight children drawn from the picture, a picture of one child, and was told that child would needed treatment that would cost at the same amount, $300,000. They were given the opportunity to donate to that child. What they found was the donations were far greater towards the single child than to the eight, even though the amount needed was the same in both conditions. People did not see both conditions side by side. They saw only one or two of those conditions. They responded more strongly to the single child. We decided to see well, that was one versus eight, what if there were just two children versus one? So, we created that condition. We found that having two children in need reduced both the feelings of sympathy towards either the child or two children. The sympathies were greater for the single child and also the donations were greater for the single child. So, we see what we call the beginnings of the breakdown of compassion as early as the number two.
JERRY FOWLER: That just on its face seems so remarkable, in a sense that the difference between one person and two people is something that is present in our lives all the time. A lot of people that have two children and it is hard to believe they feel less compassion or love for the two children than they would if only they had one child.
PAUL SLOVIC: It is not to say that compassion and donations were absent for the two. This was a very small difference, but it was a statistically reliable difference. There is a good, theoretical ration for this. We do not attend to two people as closely as we attend to a single person. There have been studies of attention as a function of a number of people you have to attend to. We just do not focus in as carefully on two people. We appear to draw a coherent picture of who is this child. Think about putting yourself in the shoes of this child. You can put yourself in the shoes of one person, but it is harder to put yourself in the shoes of two people. We do not even have that as an expression. It is not that we cannot relate to two, but it is a little harder. Two people are not one entity. We cannot draw as clear and a coherent picture of two people as we can for one. We think this ability to focus in and attend to a person is necessary to create the strongest and emotional connection. That emotional connection is what motivates the charitable response in this case. So again, it is not that it is gone. It starts to crack ever so slightly. If we start to see the weakening of a compassionate response as quickly as the number two, well, no wonder it is gone when its 200,000 people when we try to relate to.
JERRY FOWLER: A recent event that you mention in your article, your foreignpolicy.com article, actually, you kind of invoke it to support part of your part of your argument, but it also raises some problems for this argument, is the response to the victims of the December 2004 Tsunami. There was this huge event that affected hundred of thousands of people, and there was an incredible outpouring of support and donations to provide relief to these people. In some ways that would seem to be a counter example to the idea that people cannot respond to large scale suffering – or that they do not respond, not that they cannot, but they tend not to.
PAUL SLOVIC: Certainly in some sense it is, it is also the strong response to the victims of hurricane Katrina, could be another example. People might argue not enough was done, in either of those cases. Clearly there was a tremendous outpour of sympathy and aide on the part of both individuals and governments. But I think there are important differences between those tragedies and genocide. For example, the natural disasters follow what the sociologist; Kai Erikson calls “the normal rules of plot,” in a story. That is, there is a beginning, a middle on-going phase, and then there is an end to it. When the tsunami has passed or the hurricane is gone, it is over and then you have a recovery phase. We can all kind of empathize with people who need to recover from some adverse event. It has happened to all of us where something has happened and we have to recover. So, we can relate to that. With genocide it is not clear. There is no clear end to it, until all the people are dead or something dramatic happens to stop it. So, while it is ongoing, it is open ended. It does not have a clear ending or recovery phase. It is much more complicated in that sense than the natural disasters. Another important difference was that the media coverage for the Tsunami and Hurricane Katrina was intense. It was twenty-four hours a day, in your face, up-close and personal media coverage. You saw the reporters with their cameras right there, right on the scene, during the hurricane or right after filming the storm, the Tsunami surge. So, we got very intense coverage and a lot of personal coverage. So, the victims were brought up close to us where we could feel their distress and make these emotional connections. There were important differences, but it does show that under the right circumstances, we can relate to large numbers. It just seems to be that the kind of reporting we are getting on genocide and most recently the genocide in Darfur, does not give us that kind of intense personal coverage.
JERRY FOWLER: Let me just untangle the two strands we started out with; affect and reason. We started out by saying, between a picture and statistics, people respond much more to the picture than to statistics. Then we were talking about pictures of one child versus pictures of two children and people respond more strongly to one child. Is the distinction between those two responses? Is that just the breakdown of affect or is that what was occurring in the first situation with reason kind of interfering with affect?
PAUL SLOVIC: That is a good question and I can see what the evidence I am putting forth could be a little bit confusing because there is really two kinds of processes going on. One is the reaction to numbers. The other is reaction to pictures. They are somewhat different, but in both cases we see a form of insensitivity. Let us look first at the reaction to numbers. What we seem to find is that people cannot relate very easily to tragedies that are represented to us in terms statistics or numbers. Annie Dillard, the American writer, talked about this and tried to illustrate this in one of her books. She gave us the population of China at the time she was writing in 1999. There are 1,198,500,000 people alive in China. To get a feel of what this means and I would emphasize the words feel and means, she said just take yourself and all of your singularity, complexity and love and multiply it by 1,198,500,000. She said, “There is nothing to it.” She is kind of joking with us. She knows we can look at this number, we can read it, we can write a large number, but we cannot feel the humanity that is represented by a billion people. That is sort of what is going on, in one sense when tragedies are represented to us statistically. We cannot translate those easily into feelings unless we step back and think about the individuals represented by these numbers. Again, with the numbers, once you see there are 200,000 thousand people who have been killed in Darfur, if someone says, “oh wait a minute, we know there have been 300,000,” you will not feel as much different between 200,000 and 300,000. Even though there are 100,000 more people, our feelings system just is not sensitive to that kind of information. That is the problem with the numerical representation that we are very sensitive to the first death and somewhat less so to the second and less so to the third that at some point, our feelings kind of reach a plateau and flatten out and we are not sensitive anymore. That is one problem.
A separate problem is if we do start to think about the individuals through names or pictures that underlie the numbers. There too we seem to have trouble when the numbers start to get bigger. Again, Annie Dillard has a good psychological insight to this. In sort of thinking about the tragedies she is writing about, she talks about compassion, fatigue. She asked the question; at what number do other people begin to blur from me? There is this notion of blurring that we think we are capturing the psychological notion of blurring, which is what we are picking up in these experiments where you are looking at more than one person. The images, in a sense, seem to blur and you kind of loose the strength of feeling you have when you focus just on one person. That is a little different than reacting to the larger numbers, but it is related. It is another problem that we have, that our feeling system has in dealing with mass tragedy.
JERRY FOWLER: In the little time that we have left, what are the practical implications of this for those of us who are trying to increase public concern about Darfur, in particular and the problem of genocide in general? How do we get around this kind of basic psychological fact?
PAUL SLOVIC: There are two implications of this work. The first relates to kind of the media coverage which has been very inadequate for Darfur. That is, we need information about the people. We need personal stories, narratives to help us connect to the people. There is information on the internet about news from Darfur, but there is relatively little of this in the mainstream media, at least I have not seen much. We need more coverage, but I think the broader message is basically we tend to react to tragedies like Darfur with our intuitive systems, our moral intuitions, which are based on our feelings. I think what our research shows is that we cannot trust this system. We need it. It is important that we have feelings, but it lets us down. It fails to capture the reality of the situation. That puts more importance on what I would call moral argument as oppose to moral intuition. If we step back, even if we see the numbers which are huge – hundred of thousands of people killed and millions displaced – instead of just staying with our intuitive response, which is kind of numbed, we step back and look hard at the numbers, then we can understand that through argument that this is intolerable. It is a situation that should not be ignored. Then the question is, then what? We have to create laws and institutions that force us to act in the face of genocide. We know it is right to do so. The genocide convention was supposed to do that, but it seems not to be working. The United Nations, that is an institution that should be taking charge here, seems to be structured in a way so that it is not able to act effectively in places like Darfur because members of the Security Council can block action. Those are institutional “fix its” needed in order to compel us to do what we will recognize is the right thing to do if we step away from our emotions and reason out the seriousness of the problem.
JERRY FOWLER: Paul Slovic is president of Decision Research and Professor of Psychology of University of Oregon. Paul thanks so much for taking the time to be with us.
PAUL SLOVIC: Thank you for having me here Jerry.
