From: Stanford Social Innovation Review
Research: The Emotions of Aid
Stanford Social Innovation Review:
“One death is a tragedy; 1 million is a statistic,” Joseph Stalin is supposed to have said. The more people we see suffering, the less we care. It’s an unfortunate quirk that psychologists so far have blamed on our brains: Humans are tuned to individuals, the thinking goes; we are just not capable of feeling compassion for whole groups.
A new study calls that comfortable conclusion into question. “The collapse of compassion is an active process,” says Daryl Cameron, a doctoral candidate in social psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “It’s not some passive limitation on human experience. It’s the end result of an active choice not to feel something.”
Read more: Stanford Social Innovation Review
More of our Members in the Media >
APS regularly opens certain online articles for discussion on our website. Effective February 2021, you must be a logged-in APS member to post comments. By posting a comment, you agree to our Community Guidelines and the display of your profile information, including your name and affiliation. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations present in article comments are those of the writers and do not necessarily reflect the views of APS or the article’s author. For more information, please see our Community Guidelines.
Please login with your APS account to comment.