May 3

May 3 On Caring More About the One Than the Many

All COVID-19-related fatalities are a tragedy, no matter the numbers or the location of the victim. But yet, our focus, media coverage, and our response are different depending on if the deaths take place close to home or far away – even if the number of casualties are much higher overall in the faraway place. Take, for example, the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, where people were perishing in large numbers in China – reporting approximately 81,000 people infected and over 3,000 fatalities. This tragedy wasn’t even enough to rattle Western countries into preventative measures – and now we have a global pandemic with over 3.5 MILLION people infected.

What’s going on here?

The following reposted article (which I originally wrote and published it on 28 June 2019) describes some of the issues at play. Why does our sympathy (and related action) differ depending on where, who, and how many victims there are? Do we care more about the few or the many when it comes to COVID-19?

Let’s take another example. In Africa, every minute one child dies from malaria, one child dies from measles, and six children die from pneumonia, with almost ~80% of these cases impacting children under the age of 5. We don’t even see stories about this in the news, much less coverage about how that number is set to double based on COVID-19 related disruptions to antimalarial medication supply chains.

What is it about the way we think that allows us to care more about the few than the many?

It turns out it is because of how much information we get about the victims, how emotionally-charged that information is, and how much we can relate to the victims.

It has long been a complaint of mine that the horrific deaths of individuals in Western countries due to terrorism attacks or other disasters receive much more attention and coverage in the media compared to terror or natural disaster-related deaths in non-Western countries – even if the total number of deaths is much lower in the Western countries.

For example, media extensively covered the 2015 Paris terror attacks targeting Charlie Hebdo that killed 17 and injured many other civilians. In the aftermath, 3.7 million people marched to show unity in the face of terrorism. At almost the same moment, approximately 2,000 people were murdered in Nigeria in an attack by Boko Haram militants in the town of Baga. Yet the media coverage of the latter was remarkably less than the reports on Paris.

All of these victims are humans. They all have families, and a future that was erased by factors beyond their control. Why the disparity?

Access to Information

A key difference between the incidents is the access to information. Access in Boko Haram territory is limited for journalists as they are often targeted by the militants. Attacks have further limited connections that are already a struggle for most in the region, leaving fewer avenues to access internet or other communications in the almost-totally Boko Haram-controlled region. Surely this autocratic control is an even more important reason for the world to take notice of this crisis, right? Apparently no. This stands in stark contrast to hyper-connected Paris. As such, the quality and personalization of information from both events is very different. The world was able to watch and imagine being in Paris as the events unfolded.

The Empathy Gap

Some commentators have labelled this as an empathy gap. A hot-cold empathy gap refers to how people consistently underestimate the impact of visceral drivers on their own reactions, behaviours, and preferences. Our feelings and attitudes are highly impacted by our emotional states. How this can be interpreted is that our association with Paris as a safe city in contrast to scary terrorist attacks creates a sense of shock and fear. This is as opposed to mass killing in Boko-Haram controlled areas, a place that is already scary for many of us to think about, might appear less shocking and create a less intense emotional reaction. Strong emotional response to Paris and a less strong response to other terrorist events around the world could drive our attention differently.

Ingroup vs. Outgroup

Scientists blame our brains. We perceive victims differently based on if they are the same or different to us – or “ingroup vs. outgroup”. Similarity can be determined by geography, culture, religion, gender, etc. Media favouring of the 2017 London terror attacks could be because the victims are so relatable to much of the Western world. Cognitive neuroscientist Emile Bruneau from MIT found that when showing a group of Arabs and Israelis news reports about attacks and suffering in their own countries, the areas of the brain associated with empathy were activated. When showing them similar news reports about suffering in South American countries, these same areas of the brain were not engaged. Bruneau argues that just because we have a stronger cognitive reaction to seeing harm come to members of our ingroup doesn’t mean we don’t care about victims in our outgroup altogether. Furthermore, our classification of different peoples as ingroup or outgroup is fluid and context dependent.

Being on the inside is a matter of perspective.

The Identifiable Victim Effect

There maybe some similarity between the ingroup vs. outgroup phenomenon with the Identifiable Victim Effect. This cognitive bias prompts us to be more helpful to “actual people” with a face and name (and more familiar to you) than to anonymous victims. This often aggregates to providing more aid to a specific, identifiable person rather than a vaguely defined group. Research has found that images and representations are more effective at eliciting response compared to abstract statistics. The identifiable victim brings us one step close to the suffering of the individual in question, often evoking narrative tools that conjure up emotional reactions on our end.

P.s. I found a very compelling example of Identifiable Victim Effect here (5 min read in Psychology Today).

Hoping that if something bad happens to me, it happens to ONLY me!

Or, preferably, nothing bad happens…

It’s not just about terrorist events, our cognitions apply this sense-making technique to natural disasters too. Research by Jacoba Urist found that American media attention correlated with geographic proximity to the U.S. and the number of American tourists who had visited the country in question. Urist uses the example of a 1976 Guatemalan earthquake with 4,000 fatalities accrued a third of the media coverage of an Italian earthquake with 1,000 deaths.

This effect even impacts our donation behavior. Logic would perhaps indicate that our willingness to donate would being proportional to the overall need – for example, I’d donate more if I knew 100 people needed help compared to just one person. In reality, we often see the opposite. Large numbers become incomprehensible to grasp, and fall into abstraction in our minds. This cognitive bias is known as scope neglect or scope insensitivity, when the valuation of the problem does not expand in a multiplicative relationship to its size. We can’t verify that all 100 people need help, or maybe we feel now our ability to help is diminished by the sheer scale of the need, but we can certainly relate to the one in need. Christopher Hsee from Chicago’s Booth School of Business tested this bias in the following experiment:

“He asked volunteers to imagine that an elementary school principal asked them to donate money so that 20 low-income kindergarteners could get Christmas gifts. The request included a portrait of one of the needy children, a little girl. Some of the volunteers were told: “Please think about all of these 20 children. How much are you willing to donate to help these 20 children?” These volunteers served as controls. Others were also asked this but—before this request—they were told to focus on one child: “How much would you donate to help this one child?” So the only difference was that some volunteers first came up with—and wrote down—a hypothetical amount they would be willing to give to a single needy kindergartener.”

Those who were asked to focus on one child were more generous, they contributed twice as much as those who were told to focus on all 20 children. Those focusing on one child gave as much to that one child as those in the other group gave to all 20 children.

It’s like Mother Teresa’s famous quote: “If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.”

What can we do about it?

The COVID-19 pandemic requires a coordinated response to ensure that the spread of the virus is stopped, the necessary medical equipment is distributed, and there are as few disruptions to necessary supply chains as possible. For example, WHO-reported disruptions to antimalarial medicines in sub-Saharan Africa due to COVID-19 could lead to double the numbers of Malaria deaths. This would mean just under 800,000 deaths from Malaria in a worst-case scenario projection. This is compared to under 70,000 deaths due to COVID-19 in the US to date. Yes, governments are responsible for the protection of their citizens, and should take measures to do so. But it does not mean that all other humanity need be ignored, especially when this imbalance of empathy might start with our own exposure to information.

Although news is generally depressing, communicate with your news outlets that you’d like to see a balance of local and international stories. Tell them about the need to emphasize the similarities of those your read about in the news to the outlet’s readership demographics. The news industry is also a business – show them that there is a demand to stay updated on events in areas further away. As for your usual news outlets: perhaps hunt a littler deeper. Ask yourself what is really different between you and those individuals in far away places.

Understand this is a cognitive bias that impacts us all. This means that this is the frame of mind that even policy-makers and government officials can succumb to, however strong they might subscribe to utilitarian ethics. Look at proposed policies with a critical eye and try to think if it really is the best outcome, not just one that benefits the in-group.

Perhaps with more self-awareness as individuals and a society we can continue to craft a world that feels more united.

A more united world is truly what we need to combat a global public health pandemic. Understanding how other countries are faring in the fight against COVID-19 will be crucial to our own plans. This means combatting our biases now. Borders are not a natural phenomenon – we, as humans, created the concept – and viruses don’t care about it. Let’s think like a virus!

Stay safe,