By Erwann Michel-Kerjan and Paul Slovic
Unless you have been living on a remote island with no phone, radio or Internet, for the past two months you know Pakistan is facing an up-hill battle. While floodwaters started to recede, still about one-fifth of the entire country is under water; 20 million people are affected. Yes, we said 20 million!
The United Nations, and its newly appointed Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, Valerie Amos, have been trying to rally the international community to provide the necessary assistance, but the response has been very slow.
But why? Psychology and behavioral economics can help explain the challenges inherent to improving society's reaction to catastrophe risks.
Psychic numbing -- Inaction in the face of such a large-scale disaster is puzzling: economic rationality implies that we should care more about two people than we care about just one, and more about three than two, and so on. By the same reasoning, we should care a lot about so many people being severely affected by this disaster of unprecedented magnitude -- 20 million times more to be precise (if our reaction were simply a linear function). But we don't.
Experience shows that the valuation of life-saving in fact decreases, rather than increases, when we are faced with large numbers. That's because our capacity to "feel" is not only limited, it also diminishes rapidly. New research discovers a disturbing psychological tendency: people felt less compassion and donated less aid to a large group of people than to a small group, less aid to a pair of victims than to either individual alone... the problem is that action on our part depends upon feelings of compassion that may be hard to arouse and sustain over time, for large numbers of victims. We cannot "feel the meaning" associated with threats to 20 million people.
Disaster fatigue -- There is another reason why so few people have helped Pakistanis. The historical trajectory along which disasters happen also has a critical influence on our ability to care about the victims. After the Haiti earthquake in January, another major quake occurred in Chile just a few weeks later. Then, closer to us here in the United States, the major environmental disaster caused by the BP oil spill dominated the news for months. There is a limit to what our brain and our heart can handle. In economic terms, there is a decreasing marginal capacity to care about disasters and act. To say it simply, we suffer from compassion fatigue. If the Pakistan flooding had occurred before all these other extreme events, our empathy (and reaction) would likely have been much more pronounced.
We believe that many more extreme events will happen in the near future --floods and other natural disasters, new modes of terrorist attacks from Al Qaeda, technological accidents, and pandemics. It will thus be critical to better appreciate how human beings are likely to look at those catastrophes, and react (or not). As our feelings may mislead us regarding the seriousness of such events, the critical question we all face is: How do we design better institutional mechanisms that are faithful in the face of large disasters to the high value we place on individual human life? Given the highly interdependent world we all live in now, not addressing this question will lead to uncontrolled consequences, with feedback loop effects on us sooner than we think.
Erwann Michel-Kerjan teaches at the Wharton Business School and is managing director of the Wharton Risk Center. He is chairman of the OECD Secretary-General Board on Financial Management of Catastrophes. Paul Slovic is president of Decision Research and serves on the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on Humanitarian Assistance. They are co-authors of The Irrational Economist (PublicAffairs, 2010); www.TheIrrationalEconomist.com.
I can't work anymore until the economy picks up and then I have to find something (hopefully) I can do from home. I've pretty much stopped spending money (spouse still works), and won't be doling out money to anyone until the economy picks up and I know I probably won't have to help them out.
Compassion sometimes is lacking, its redirected.
The idea is that data visualization and mapping is one way to make disasters more palpable and comprehendible to those who (as someone mentioned below) might be too far removed from the actual disaster to find a point of entry. Thanks to online data-visualization technologies, people can take in a lot of information at once using interactive mediums that engage their interest. Simply because the sites are fun or well-designed, viewers might want to explore the site. There's still a LONG way to go, but it's a start.
By the way, BCLC has tracked more than $15 million in donations from American businesses to the Pakistan flood, and while this is only a very slight fraction of the more than $2 billion called for, it shows that there are people out there who want to help and are paying attention. (For details of the giving, see http://bclc.uschamber.com/bclc/programs/disaster/pakistanfloods_tracker.htm.)
How can we build on that, and how can we engage more people in caring? I would welcome any replies, as BCLC will be working on these issues for a long time: Emily Drew, edrew@uschamber.com.
It should be recalled that in 1947 over a million misbelievers were ousted and half that number were slaughtered in Pakistan (not including twice that number ousted and half that number slaughtered in East Pakistan, now Bangladesh). That was no natural disaster.
If, from the outset, there were figures showing the contributions of the wealthy class in Pakistan, then, do you think the foreign response might have been different? But through the critical period never saw a wealthy Pakistani interviewed nor any mention made of contributions from wealthy Pakistanis. Are local wealthy people to be ignored in your scenarios?
As a practicing Buddhist, I find the concept of compassion fatigue to be truly disturbing. I spend many hours each week working to develop and deepen compassion. To me, compassion is as much a part of life as air, water, the earth, or any other natural phenomenon. Although I am unable to act on as many things as I would like, the idea that people are losing compassion is deeply disturbing.
As I look at the comments, I realize that this compassion fatigue may well be part of the never-ending march toward American self-centeredness. Hatian aid held up by ONE Senator? Aid and personnel from poor nations arriving BEFORE American aid? Is this compassion fatigue part of an American view that, according to one American leader, "You are either with us, or against us?" Is American compassion now (officially) tied to doing what the U.S. instructs? Is this a vestige of the European influences on North American culture? Do African, Latin American, and Asian cultures also suffer from "compassion fatigue?"
These are honest questions. I have no answers.
The Pakinstanis were likely not helped by the Americans because of a predominant anti-Islamic view in the United States, not because of fatigue.
http://www.daily.pk/iran-allocates-another-100m-for-flood-victims-22107/
Chinese children: About 100 primary-level students of Beijing International Academy of Arts and Science, including those of the kindergarten, donated $3,100 for the flood-affected people of Pakistan at a ceremony held at the campus on Tuesday.
China has also dispatched its second medical team comprising 59 doctors and paramedics to Pakistan while a cargo plane brought 1,350 tents for the flood victims on Tuesday morning. agencies
some people are born with compassion, others with immense egos.
it is complex.
too complex for a blog.