The bloodied, dust-covered image of Omran Daqneesh, a 5-year-old Syrian boy from Aleppo whose family home was destroyed in an air strike, is making headlines and heartache in ways that the five-year-old conflict rarely does. The last time this happened was
about a year ago, with the photo Aylan Kurdi, a 3-year-old Syrian boy
whose drowned body washed ashore on the Greek island of Kos. The
outpouring that comes following photos such as these would infuriate a
utilitarian philosopher — be it Peter Singer or Jeremy Bentham — since
why should people be more motivated to care about the tragedy of a
single child rather than the 21 million refugees worldwide who have been forced to flee their homes?
According to a new study in Frontiers in Psychology,
it’s because people are more biased toward the plight of one person
rather than that of a group. The study, lead-authored by psychologist
Daffie Konis at Tel Aviv University, follows up previous research
indicating that a single victim leads to greater emotional investment
and willingness to give to charity than if there are multiple people
suffering. Not only that, people are more satisfied with life-saving interventions if fewer people are at risk.
Konis
and her team did three experiments to tease out the “one is more
valuable than many” reactions. In one experiment with 127 participants
recruited online, subjects read a hypothetical story about Dr. Stillman,
a dentist who loved to fish. In the story, the doctor decided to take a
long-weekend fishing trip and push back the appointments with patients
who were waiting to see him. Every participant read three versions of
the story: one with two patients, another with three, and a third with
ten. The participants then rated how much they thought patients should
be compensated for the misdeed. A majority of participants thought that
the fewer the patients, the more they should be compensated and the more
the dentist should be punished. In a related experiment, 91 subjects
read about the story of a financial adviser named Jeff, who read analyst
reports saying the stock market was about to drop, but instead of
selling off shares, he left the office to hang out with a friend —
leading to a 15 percent drop in clients’ portfolios. Instead of each
participant reading every story, this time one group read the story with
one client losing money, a second with five unrelated clients, and a
third with a five clients with a joint plan. Similar to the first
experiment, participants thought that the one client got more screwed
over than the group of clients. Again, the paradox held: Jeff was more guilty when just one person got the bad end of his negligence.
In
another, more wickedly designed experiment, 81 undergrads took what
they thought was a test of their cognitive ability, after which they
received false feedback: some that they did better than their peers,
some that they did worse. Then they received a disclaimer about their
being deceived: some were told that everybody who took the test got
tricked in the same way, others were told only they were duped. Again,
participants thought the offense was less immoral and harmful when
others were involved. To he authors, the findings suggest a moral
judgment bias where “a transgression affecting several individuals was
paradoxically judged as less (rather than more) severe and immoral than
one affecting a single victim.” This helps to understand why Daqneesh
is so affecting: he’s just one victim. Regardless of how moral it is,
people are apparently biased to caring more about the sorrow of a single
figure than a group. If you do feel stirred to donate, effective altruism is a good place to start.
Thanks http://nymag.com/
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