We
are constantly bombarded with ever-increasing amounts of information, creating
a real challenge for our brains to process it all. Yes, the human mind is
powerful and able to accomplish amazing things, yet how can we deal with
everything? From the violence
woven throughout fictional media to the real-world horrors presented 24/7 on
the news, these stimuli can easily desensitize us. Scott and Paul Slovic
describe how such psychic numbing can be countered in their book Numbers and
Nerves. Today Paul Slovic explains how psychic numbing and desensitization may
occur and how it affects us. If you missed Scott Slovic’s post from last week,
read it here.
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Paul
Slovic
July
25, 2015
Sunriver,
Oregon
The
human mind is capable of astonishing feats of creative problem solving and
technological wizardry. And we are good with numbers, too, when we think slowly
and carefully about them—witness the three-billion-mile voyage the New Horizons
spacecraft just made in its close encounter with Pluto.
But,
most of the time, we let our brain calculate for us in a fast, intuitive mode
of thinking where answers come, not as numbers or numerical comparisons of
benefits and costs, but rather as feelings—good, bad, attractive, unattractive,
likable or not, etc. Psychologists refer to these feelings as “affect.” When
the objects of our attention are people, or other creatures in distress, these
feelings represent what Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert has called “the arithmetic
of compassion.”
Unfortunately,
when we let our intuitive feelings function as our “moral compass,” the
arithmetic of compassion is often faulty, in ways that Scott and I describe in
the early chapters of Numbers and Nerves. Evolution designed our faculties of
vision and hearing to be most sensitive to faint sounds and dim images, to
alert us quickly to subtle signs of impending danger. But a nervous system that
is exquisitely sensitive to small phenomena cannot sustain that sensitivity as
sound becomes louder and light becomes brighter. Doubling the sound or light
energy of a stimulus does not double its perceived loudness or brightness.
Remarkably, and unfortunately, a similar desensitization occurs when we rely on
our quick intuitive feelings to judge the value of amounts of money or numbers
of endangered lives. Finding 200 dollars does not make us twice as happy as
finding 100, and hearing about 200 threatened lives does not distress us twice
as much as the news of 100 does. In some circumstances, these 200 endangered
lives may even feel less important than 100. A strange arithmetic, indeed—a
form of “psychic numbing.”
The
introduction to our book illustrates this desensitization with this four-photo
display of candles, where every candle represents a life.
The first lit candle
brightens the scene markedly. The second candle makes it a bit brighter, but
not twice as much. Going from 30 candles in the third image to 31 in the fourth
hardly seems to make a difference. In blunt terms, with this kind of thinking,
the felt value of a life is not fixed. We often go to great lengths to protect
a single person, even a single animal or a tree. But those individual lives
feel less valuable as the number of other lives at risk increases. In such
circumstances, our efforts to protect individuals similarly decrease.
One
way to counter psychic numbing and better apprehend the scale of threats to
humans, other species, and the planet more broadly may be to link faces, names,
stories, and images to the statistics in vivid, multidimensional ways. In the
latter sections of our book, we call on writers and visual artists to show how
this might be done and why it is important in a world facing many challenges.
You could say that our aim in creating this book has been to facilitate a more
rational arithmetic of compassion.