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Right now, over 800 million people in the world don’t have enough to eat. Did you want to turn the page after reading that sentence? If yes, you can claim that it’s your brain’s fault. That’s the view of psychologist Paul Slovic of the University of Oregon, who has done research into why people do (and don’t) donate. Slovic discovered people are often overwhelmed when faced by huge needs like 800 million hungry people. It’s much easier, he found, for people to give to help one person, not many.
Through his research, Slovic showed one group of people a picture of a little girl suffering from starvation. He then asked how much they were willing to donate to help her. He told another group about the starving girl, adding there were millions more like her. The result? “People who were shown the statistics along with the information about the little girl gave about half as much money as those who just saw the little girl,” he says.
On a rational level, this doesn’t make sense. You’d think hearing about millions who are hungry would cause people to give more because of the huge need, but it doesn’t work that way. Big numbers de-motivate people. We feel overwhelmed by the enormity of the need, believing “nothing I can do will make a big difference,” Slovic says. In fundraising circles, this is known as the “singularity effect,” the idea that people are more willing to help a single, identifiable victim than multiple, non-identified ones. It’s not a conscious thing; people don’t actively decide not to help. The response occurs at an unconscious level. It’s what our brains automatically do when confronted by enormous needs. As Slovic puts it: “As the numbers grow, we sort of lose the emotional connection to the people who are in need.”
"The response occurs at an unconscious level. It’s what our brains automatically do when confronted by enormous needs. As Slovic puts it: “As the numbers grow, we sort of lose the emotional connection to the people who are in need.”
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Jamil Zaki, a professor of psychology at Stanford University and the director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Laboratory, has also researched in this area. He specializes in what he calls “compassion collapse.” When we hear about big disasters, with large numbers of homes destroyed and people killed, injured, or made houseless, we can be left “strangely unmoved,” he says, once again blaming our brains. “Human empathy has been built, over thousands of generations, to respond to certain triggers—for instance, a child’s cry or an anguished face,” Zaki says. “People do empathize more naturally with one person’s visible, heart-wrenching sorrow than with descriptions of massive tragedies, and human emotion does have a limited range.” He adds, “A single victim produces these signs of distress, which tug at us and inspire our help. Groups give us statistics, which land flat, triggering little, and thus benefiting less from others’ compassion.”
"“Human empathy has been built, over thousands of generations, to respond to certain triggers—for instance, a child’s cry or an anguished face,” Zaki says. “People do empathize more naturally with one person’s visible, heart-wrenching sorrow than with descriptions of massive tragedies, and human emotion does have a limited range.”
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If you need an example of how this works, just recall the reaction to the 2015 photo of the dead body of two-year-old Alan Kurdi, the Syrian child washed up on a beach by the Mediterranean Sea. The Syrian civil war had been going on for a long time, producing millions of refugees and untold suffering, before that terrible picture went viral. But when the photo was published, hearts were moved. It generated a global outpouring of assistance.
Of course, compassion fatigue also plays a role. How much suffering can we absorb? Wildfires, floods, school shootings, the war in Ukraine. Sometimes we just want to turn off the news. Which brings us back to the millions of people who are hungry, and the role of people of faith.
"Our brains may be hard-wired not to respond to the needs of millions, but every major religion requires its adherents to feed the hungry.
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Our brains may be hard-wired not to respond to the needs of millions, but every major religion requires its adherents to feed the hungry. It’s a divine imperative, a hallmark of sincere belief, and it seems to be working. Religiosity is a key factor in determining whether or not people donate, and how much—people of faith donate more and more often than non-religious people. One reason that is the case is people of faith are more likely to hear about needs around the world at religious services—in sermons, sharing, or the prayers of the people. (Which means the downturn in attendance at religious services is a cause of concern for faith-based aid groups.) Our brains may be hardwired not to help millions, but our faith and various scriptures compel us to respond to people who are hungry. Maybe that makes all the difference.
The following excerpt is from John Longhurst’s new book Can Robots Love God and Be Saved? A Journalist Reports on Faith, CMU Press, 2024, and appears with permission of the publisher.
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Learn more about Can Robots Love God and Be Saved?:
In columns and reporting for the Winnipeg Free Press for over 20 years, journalist John Longhurst has covered faith from a multitude of perspectives. This collection of his most stimulating reflections on faith of all sorts is also a series of reports on culture, politics, death, technology, and just about anything in our society that intersects with religion. Longhurst is perennially curious about religious faith in its various expressions. As his Free Press bio says, "One constant through John’s career has been his belief that almost every story has a religion angle, and that the media could do a better job of telling it." Whether writing about Holocaust survivors, residential schools, religious relics, inter-religious misunderstandings, assisted dying, or how women religious leaders are treated, John Longhurst has something thought-provoking to say about the way faith intersects with all aspects of our lives.