“Now we’re trying to figure out very complex risk scenarios where there’s a lot of statistics available. “From an evolutionary perspective, we were focused on the things that threatened to kill us immediately or small group interactions,” says Melissa Finucane, a senior behavioral and social scientist at policy think tank the Rand Corporation, who has studied decision-making and risk assessment. Part of the problem may be that as numbers get bigger, they mean less and less to us personally. ( Read more about why people are ignoring social distancing rules. In the case of the pandemic, it may be leading to a kind of apathy that is making people complacent about hand washing or wearing a mask – both of which have been shown to reduce transmission of the virus. This in turn leaves us less likely to take the kind of action needed to stop genocides, send aid after natural disasters or pass legislation to fight global warming. In fact, Slovic’s research suggests that as statistical numbers associated with a tragedy get larger and larger, we become desensitised and have less of an emotional response to them. The figure is “ twice the number of Americans lost during the entire Vietnam War”, and “ exceeds the number of US military combat fatalities in every conflict since the Korean War”. In the US, which reached a grim milestone of 100,000 deaths last month, journalists have reached for ways to help people understand the devastation. But as we zoom out, can anyone really wrap their head around such large numbers? Each death is a tragedy played out on an individual level, with a family left shocked and bereaved. The number of lives claimed by the virus has already exceeded 400,000 and more than seven million cases have been recorded in 200 countries. The millions of lives lost in natural disasters, wars or to famine, for example, grow too large to fathom.Įven now we can see the same strange process happening as the worldwide death toll due to coronavirus rises. Too often, the deaths of many simply become a statistic. While most of us will see a single death as a tragedy, we can struggle to have the same response to large-scale loss of life. They exemplify one of the most baffling aspects of the human response to the plight of others. If I look at the one, I will." These are the words of a woman whose acts of charity and kindness earned her sainthood – Mother Teresa.
0 kommentar(er)
