GPI Faculty Works

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Browsing GPI Faculty Works by Subject "psychic numbing"

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    Iconic photographs and the ebb and flow of empathic response to humanitarian disasters
    (PNAS, 2017-01-10) Slovic, Paul; Vastfjall, Daniel; Erlandsson, Arvid; Gregory, Robin
    The power of visual imagery is well known, enshrined in such familiar sayings as “seeing is believing” and “a picture is worth a thousand words.” Iconic photos stir our emotions and transform our perspectives about life and the world in which we live. On September 2, 2015, photographs of a young Syrian child, Aylan Kurdi, lying face-down on a Turkish beach, filled the front pages of newspapers worldwide. These images brought much-needed attention to the Syrian war that had resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths and created millions of refugees. Here we present behavioral data demonstrating that, in this case, an iconic photo of a single child had more impact than statistical reports of hundreds of thousands of deaths. People who had been unmoved by the relentlessly rising death toll in Syria suddenly appeared to care much more after having seen Aylan’s photograph; however, this newly created empathy waned rather quickly.We briefly examine the psychological processes underlying these findings, discuss some of their policy implications, and reflect on the lessons they provide about the challenges to effective intervention in the face of mass threats to human well-being.
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    Whoever Saves One Life Saves the World: Confronting the Challenge of Pseudoinefficacy
    (2014) Vastfjall, Daniel; Slovic, Paul; Mayorga, Marcus
    In a great many situations where we are asked to aid persons whose lives are endangered, we are not able to help everyone. What do we then do? In a series of experiments, we first demonstrate that donors, in general, become demotivated by information about children who cannot be helped. We find that negative affect from the children not helped decreases the warm glow associated with aiding the children who can be helped. This demotivation may be a form of “pseudoinefficacy” that is nonrational. We should not be deterred from helping whomever we can because there are others we are not able to help. Second, we show that people react in two ways to such requests. Some feel less good about helping those they can help and they help less. Others feel badly because of those “out of reach” and they become even more motivated to help whomever they can. We discuss the need to better understand these two different reactions and we suggest strategies to reduce the demotivating effects of pseudoinefficacy.