The More Victims, the Less Severe the Judgment
Before reading the above linked article, I had never really thought about how empathy works. I would have assumed that the more people involved in a disaster, the more empathy and compensation the victims receive.
The results of an intriguing new study seem to prove the exact opposite. Psychologist Loran Nordgren of Northwestern University, was inspired to conduct the study after noticing the disproportionately large amount of time and resources crimes affecting small numbers of people seem to receive, vs. crimes with thousands of victims. Researchers termed this tendency the "scope-severity paradox."
"The study, which also included two experiments in the lab, is the first to show that the bias toward feeling empathy for a single individual versus many. . . causes people to make judgments based on emotion that are disproportionate to the severity of a crime."
"It has to do with the way empathy works, Slovic said. People empathize with people by putting themselves in the other person's shoes. The more shoes there are, the harder it is to empathize with any single individual. People don’t multiply their feelings of empathy by the number of people involved."
Since reading about this study this morning, I have thought about it all day. I think that the vulnerability of the people involved is a bigger indicator of empathy than population size.
The reason I think helplessness may better determining factor of empathy is because I find myself empathizing with animals, babies, and the elderly during disasters much more than others. I believe this is because these groups cannot fend for themselves. Take the earthquake in Haiti as an example. The inherent poverty on the island made people much more vulnerable to natural disaster. Thousands of people were affected, and the people in Haiti got more empathy than the couple hundred Mid-westerners facing floods at the same time.
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