Written by Daryl Cameron
As I walk down bustling Franklin Street in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, I often pass homeless people who ask me for spare change. Sometimes I let myself feel compassion for these individuals. But other times I don't want to get emotionally involved, so I look away and keep walking. Maybe you've had a similar experience. Pondering such experiences has led me to systematically explore the factors that influence when people feel compassion for others. The upshot of my research: You can choose to feel more compassion than you might think.
There are many cases when we don't feel compassion for others. Joseph Stalin reputedly said that a single victim is a tragedy, but a million victims is a statistic. And Mother Theresa said that if she looked at the mass of suffering people, she could not act to save them. Despite their differences, these two agree that it is difficult to feel compassion for many suffering victims. Psychological studies show that people feel more compassion for a single victim than for multiple victims, a finding that has been called "the collapse of compassion." The collapse of compassion should strike you as shocking. Most people predict that they would -- and should -- feel more compassion if more people are suffering. Yet people's emotional responses to actual victims tell otherwise. Imagine reading about either a single victim or eight victims. Experiments find that compassion doesn't simply level off with more victims -- so it's not that adding seven victims to the single victim increases compassion only a little bit. Instead, adding seven victims makes you feel less compassion compared to just one. Compassion plummets as the numbers increase.
Why would people respond like this? Some have argued that we are simply unable to feel compassion for mass suffering. However, we found evidence that the collapse of compassion instead reflects an active choice to turn off compassion for multiple victims. Psychologist Keith Payne and I conducted a series of studies testing this explanation. When there are more victims involved in a crisis, people become more afraid of being overwhelmed by their emotions. Because people are concerned that the emotional burden of many suffering victims may be too much to bear, they actively curb their compassion for many victims.
In one study, we asked participants to read about one or eight child refugees from the civil war in the Darfur region in West Africa. We also measured how well people could strategically control their emotions. Just as predicted, we found the collapse of compassion: People felt more compassion for one victim than eight victims. But critically, that pattern only showed up for people who were skilled at controlling their emotions. People who could not control their emotions didn't show the collapse -- in other words, they lacked the ability to cut off their compassion for multiple victims. These results show that strategic emotion control is necessary for the collapse of compassion. In another study, people in one group were told to freely experience their emotions while reading about one or eight Darfur refugees. People in another group were told to control their emotions while reading about these refugees. Those who were told to experience their emotions without controlling them didn't show the collapse of compassion. But people who were told to control their emotions showed the collapse. Importantly, emotion controllers didn't dial down emotions equally for one and eight victims; rather, seeing multiple victims cued them to engage extra effort to stifle their compassion.
Some have argued that we just can't feel compassion for mass suffering. Our studies suggest a different story: People can control whether they experience compassion for multiple victims. These findings have a promising upshot. If the collapse of compassion is a choice, then individuals have the capacity to change it in themselves. Think about compassion like a radio dial. We can tune our compassion up or down, but where the dial lands will depend on our concerns about being overwhelmed and on how well we can control our emotions.
There may be good reasons for curbing compassion. For instance, medical professionals who feel the most compassion for their patients are more likely to become emotionally burnt out compared to those who take a cooler, more business-like approach. Even so, compassion is a pivotal moral emotion, and we have found that curbing it has disadvantages too. People who eliminate their compassion toward suffering victims end up caring less about morality. We all have some control over where we set our dial, but beware: callousness has costs of its own.
This July, I, alongside some of the world's top researchers on compassion, will speak at CCARE's conference The Science of Compassion: Origins, Measures, and Interventions. The conference is open to the public. I sincerely hope that you will join the conversation.
Daryl Cameron is a doctoral candidate in social psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research focuses on the causes and consequences of compassion, and on how emotions influence moral decisions. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation. To learn more, visit his website.
I would be curious to hear more of the details about the Brahma-Vihara meditation. I agree that certain mindfulness and compassion-building techniques could be useful in preventing the collapse of compassion. I wanted to draw your attention to a recent article that has been published by a group of scientists working at the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE) at Stanford, which shows that training people in compassion cultivation can decrease "fears of compassion." This finding is very suggestive in regards to the collapse of compassion. If we can find training programs that make people less afraid of their compassion for multitudes of suffering victims, then we may be able to foster compassion precisely when it is needed the most: when there are the most victims suffering. I plan to address this question in the future.
Here's the link for those of you who are interested:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/g74555v5359m1h6v/?MUD=MP
The answers may lay within the terrain between "empathic response," and "altruistic integrity" which is no revenue generator and who's source code is only known to the unknown prophets.
Keep up the great work but know that there is a large contingency of power brokers who do not want "compassion" to continue as a genetic/human behavioral response and will do anything to silence and extinguish its affects...
I agree that compassion can be learned, there is great work on compassion training that can inform this discussion (e.g., techniques such as loving-kindness meditation, which help people to embrace rather than extinguish their compassion). If we build compassion for others, we can indeed increase human dignity. Are there any specific methods that you have in mind to build compassion?
Compassion is NOT a study, it's a way of being. And it angers me when compassion is treated like some on going experiment.
Oh my! A doctor who gets burned out because he feels compassion for his patients? Oh my goodness! They're actually people? Doctors should go into the profession because they feel compassion for those who are sick and want to make them well, NOT to line their wallets.
I found the statement, "The collapse of compassion should strike you as shocking" a problem too. Why should one find it shocking? Arriving at compassion for other people as a constant state of being takes enormous self awareness and diligent practice, which many people don't make time for. It would be most shocking to discover four people in a Safeway supermarket at any one time, all of whom have achieved a reliable state of compassion for their fellow man. It might even be shocking to find one.
Compassion is a difficult state of being to measure. For all of the hard work that most certainly went into this study, it's not altogether certain that it accomplished much.
We used a standard psychological definition of compassion, as the other-oriented emotional response that motivates people to alleviate the suffering of others. We didn't use the term "pity" at any point, precisely because we wanted to avoid something more ego-based.
I wrote that people may find the collapse of compassion to be shocking because it conflicts with people's forecasts about their emotions. As I mentioned in the post, people anticipate that they will feel more compassion when more people are suffering (which has documented in empirical studies). Many people also believe that they should feel more compassion for more victims, as a matter of moral principle. That's why it might be shocking from their perspective. I gather that you are saying that it isn't shocking when considered from a broader lens, given the requirement of diligent practice and self-awareness for compassion to develop. You make a good point.
Compassion is a difficult emotion to measure, I agree, but that does not make it impossible or worthless to do so. I suggest that you look to the Science of Compassion website to learn more about what many of us researchers are doing to extend our understanding of this important emotion.