What makes people stop caring?1 The death of an individual can have a powerful effect on our...

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What makes people stop caring?1 The death of an individual can have a powerful effect on our emotions, but as numbers rise so does our indifference. Why?2 “If I look at the mass I will never act. 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.3 They exemplify one of the most baffling aspects of the human response to the plight of others. 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. Too often, the deaths of many simply become a statistic.4 The millions of lives lost in natural disasters, wars or to famine, for example, grow too large to fathom. Each death is a tragedy played out on an individual level, with a family left shocked and bereaved. But as we zoom out, can anyone really wrap their head around such large numbers? (…) Our inability to comprehend the suffering that such numbers entail can harm the way we respond to such tragedies. This might be due, in part, to a psychological phenomenon known as psychic numbing, the idea that “the more people die, the less we care”.5 “The fast, intuitive gut feeling is miraculous in many ways, but it has some flaws,” says Paul Slovic, a psychologist at the University of Oregon who has been studying psychic numbing for decades. “If we’re talking about lives, one life is tremendously important and valuable and we’ll do anything to protect that life, save that life, rescue that person. But as the numbers increase, our feelings don’t commensurately increase as well.”6 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. 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.7 In a series of studies in Sweden in 2014, Slovic and his colleagues demonstrated that we not only become numb to the significance of increasing numbers, but our compassion can actually fade or collapse overall as numbers increase.8 Participants were presented with either a picture of a poor child or a picture of two poor children and asked about their willingness to donate. Rather than feel twice as sad and twice as willing to help, people donated less when they saw two children instead of one. Slovic says that’s because an individual is the easiest unit for humans to understand and empathise with.9 “If you see one child, you can focus on the child,” he says. “You can think about who they are and how they are like your own child. You can concentrate more deeply on one person than two. [With two] your attention starts to lessen and so do your feelings. And our feelings are what drive our behaviour.”Available at: <https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200630-what-makes-people-stop-caring>. Retrieved on August 1, 2020. Adapted;The communicative intention of the article is to

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C: present some scientific data that help explain human being’s lack of empathy.

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