Collapse of compassion

The collapse of compassion happens because people actively, perhaps subconsciously, regulate their emotions to withhold the compassion they feel for the groups of people who suffer. It is not because people are less capable of caring about plenty suffering rather than individuals who suffer. This can also be put as withholding our compassion for a wide range of sufferers not being a part of us from birth, rather it is something we do almost actively, in that moment people actively reduce or remove their affection.[4]

The phenomenon of the collapse of compassion has also been written about in modern journalism and media reports. On 13 January 2015, Mark Hay reported that the massacre carried out by Boko Haram received almost no immediate media attention. However, on 7 January 2015, when 12 satirists from Charlie Hebdo magazine were killed in Paris, "the media erupted (and continues to erupt) with heartfelt outrage and constant coverage."[5] Journalists like Simon Allison of the Daily Maverick have clarified bias media coverage as a sign that the media and the world do not mourn deaths in Africa the way they do in the West, this obvious bias in media coverage also points towards a more understated failure in our natural human ability to gather any empathy as the number of victims rise following a mass killing or to see past the fact that numbers of people are not people, but that they are numbers.[6]

Economic theorists argued that emotions and helping behaviour should track the number of people in need of help, we should respond more strongly when more people are suffering, whatever the context.[7] Yet when psychologists measure actual emotion and helping behaviour, this is not the observed result. People tend to experience strong emotion in response to one individual in need of aid, and this translates into a strong desire to help. But when there are many individuals, people actually feel less emotion and act less charitably.[8]

Ka Ho Tam

Ka Ho Tam hired 242 undergrad students to participate in his study, they read stories of people from different parts of the world who shared their experiences (e.g. having a family gathering) or specific to a particular culture (e.g. celebrating an Ethiopian festival). Thereafter participants of 1 to 8 poverty-stricken Ethiopian children, along with a description of how people from that part of Ethiopia are suffering. Lastly, these participants did questionnaires to measure similarity with and compassion toward the Ethiopian children. He found that, the reading of the shared experiences drew out compassion toward a single victim and not multiple victims. This can be further explained by saying that people actively suppress compassion when they think it might be overwhelming; this means that humans respond to the suffering of others based on their own self-interest.[12]

C. Daryl Cameron and B. Keith Payne

Cameron and Payne's experiment tested whether removing a source of motivation to regulate would reduce the collapse of compassion. Other researchers like Kogut and Ritov and Small et al. who also did studies included measures of three alternative explanations for the collapse of compassion: psychological distance, diffusion of responsibility, and success in helping the victims. People might experience less emotion toward multiple victims because they feel a greater psychological distance from these victims; because they feel less responsible for helping; or because they feel that their helping will not matter much. If these alternatives were to be eliminated however, these explanations would more support the financial cost as a critical factor in the collapse of compassion.

The nine items measuring compassion were averaged together. A two-way between-subjects analysis of variance (ANOVA) was conducted to examine the effects of help request and number of victims on compassion. There were no significant main effects of help request, or number of victims. However, there was a significant interaction between help request and number of victims. The pattern of means for the interaction between compassion, help request, and number of victims was displayed, this interaction suggests that the difference in compassion toward one versus eight victims depended upon whether participants expected to be asked to help those victims. They probed the interaction by first examining the effect of the help request separately in the one-victim and eight-victim groups. In the one-victim condition, there was not a significant effect of help request on compassion. In the eight-victim condition, by contrast, participants reported significantly greater compassion when they would not be asked to help than when they would be asked to help. They also examined the effect of number of victims separately in the help-request and no-help-request conditions. When help was requested, participants reported numerically greater compassion toward a single victim than toward eight, although this simple effect was not significant. In contrast, when help was not requested, eight victims elicited significantly more compassion than one victim. By removing the expectation that participants would be asked to donate money, they were able to reverse the typical collapse of compassion pattern.[13]

• Alexander Mitscherlich; Margarete Mitscherlich (1967). Inability to Mourn: Principles of Collective Behavior. ISBN 978-0394621708.