Compassion Fade: Affect and Charity Are Greatest for a Single Child in Need

[luke wilson]

In a rational world, as threats to life increase in scale, potential efforts to prevent harm should increase proportionally [1]. Decisions at organizational and political levels regarding the allocation of resources for humanitarian aid are characterized by how the need of others is perceived [2]. Public policy decisions reflect public opinion on specific issues, and individual responses towards humanitarian crises are likely informing and guiding these decisions [3], [4]. The main tenet of the present research is that compassion and therefore societal concern often decrease rather than increase in the face of greater threats. The primary aim of the present article is to understand the psychological underpinnings of this perverse phenomenon. More specifically, we propose and test the hypothesis that the needs of others induce affective feelings, and that donors often experience the strongest feelings for a single identified person in need. As the number of needy persons increases, affective feelings and action may begin to diminish. Such “compassion fade” has implications for traditional theoretical models of valuation and, more broadly, for the welfare of society.

In this article, we examine how affective feelings driven by attention may underlie findings that, when it comes to eliciting compassion, a single individual with a face and a name typically evokes a stronger response than a group. Numerous studies have demonstrated the identifiable victim effect, which is also quite evident outside the laboratory. People are much more willing to aid one identified individual than to help numerous unidentified or statistical victims [33]–[35]. Why is this the case? Research by Hamilton and Sherman [36] and Thompson, Hamilton, and Rust [37] demonstrates that a single individual, unlike a group, is viewed as a psychologically coherent unit. This leads to more extensive processing of information and stronger impressions about individuals than about groups. Consistent with this, Kogut and Ritov [30] found that people tend to report feeling more distress and compassion when considering a single identified victim than when considering a group of victims, even if identified (e.g., a singularity effect).

There are several ways to account for compassion fade. Our results suggest that people begin to lose affective attachment as the number in need increases. We argue that it may be natural and relatively easy to empathize and feel compassion with a single identified individual, but that it is difficult to “scale up” this emotion when we need to consider more than one individual. In fact, as the number in need increases, we may find it more difficult to empathize, but at the same time feel more negative emotion. Cameron and Payne [51] showed that as the number of lives in need of help increases, people experience negative affect and attempt to regulate these negative feelings by turning their attention away from the problem.

There are, of course, examples of sizable contributions of aid to the thousands of victims of a natural disaster that seem to run counter to compassion fade. Examination of these events show they differ in a number of ways from the life-saving cases studied here. First, they represent acute events, with a relatively clear time course, after which much of the aid is given to enable recovery. Second, these acute catastrophes are accompanied by massive, comprehensive, and vivid media coverage, including dramatic personal stories of identified victims [2]. Donors can understand the distress experienced by the victims and empathize with them [3]. This differs greatly from the scenarios studied here, involving typically invisible crises of individuals afflicted with chronic conditions of poverty such as hunger, malnutrition, and disease.

Ultimately, thoughtful deliberation, what Kahneman [6] calls slow thinking, may be necessary to alert us to an undesired disconnect between the high value we place on individual lives and our neglect of populations at risk [30], [61], [62]. Perhaps this deliberative perspective will impress upon us the need to create institutional mechanisms that doggedly pursue the hard measures needed to combat mass tragedies when our attention strays and our numbed feelings lull us into complacency [3], [63].

_http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4062481/

Can't really say much. Article speaks for itself.

Further: _http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2014/11/05/361433850/why-your-brain-wants-to-help-one-child-in-need-but-not-millions

 

[luke wilson]

Negative Effects of Attractiveness on Empathy for Children in Need

The first and most obvious practical implication of our research is that it provides nonprofit organizations with specific guidance on the selection and presentation of children on charity websites, advertising, brochures, and other promotional materials. Ours is the first research to offer evidence that using images of attractive children to represent a charity can have a negative effect on empathy and actual helping behaviors. Our results suggest that charities might benefit from selecting children of average or lower attractiveness as the “faces of need” given that we found no positive effect of attractiveness in any of our studies. Charities might even consider using basic photographic techniques to reduce the attractiveness of children in their fundraising materials when the need is not immediate or obvious to prospective donors or volunteers. This objective might be achieved by varying the type of lens used, the angle of the photograph, and lighting conditions. Our research suggests that children’s attractiveness does not affect the empathy evoked in prospective donors or volunteers in situations in which the children’s need is severe. Natural disasters, terrorist attacks, or medical emergencies are a few examples of contexts within which the need for help is obvious and immediate, but in many contexts the children’s need is ambiguous or low, such as on child sponsorship sites. An informal survey of popular websites for children’s charities indicates that in many instances the severity of need appears to be low because the children have been photographed in settings that are neutral, pleasant, or even idyllic. Moreover, the children themselves do not appear to be suffering or in a vulnerable situation, because they are smiling, clean, healthy, and nicely dressed. Our research suggests that the combination of highly attractive children and a pleasant setting in promotional materials will significantly reduce the help extended by unrelated observers.

_http://www.jcr-admin.org/files/pressPDFs/052314173930_676967.pdf

Basically.... a lot of thought goes into this sort of stuff. I suppose they can be used for good or bad depending on who is running the agenda. I posted the study to just bring to your attention that these studies are taking place... who knows what others are out there and what sorts of things they are examining.