Compassion fade and the challenge of environmental conservation
By Ezra M. Markowitz, Paul Slovic, Daniel Västfjäll, Sara D. Hodges. Judgment and Decision Making, 2013
96 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Compassion shown towards victims often decreases as the number of individuals in need of aid increases, identifiability of the victims decreases, and the proportion of victims helped shrinks. Such “compassion fade” may hamper individual-level and collective responses to pressing large-scale crises. To date, research on compassion fade has focused on humanitarian challenges; thus, it remains unknown whether and to what extent compassion fade emerges when victims are non-human others. Here we show that compassion fade occurs in the environmental domain, but only among non-environmentalists. These findings suggest that compassion fade may challenge our collective ability and willingness to confront the major environmental problems we face, including climate change. The observed moderation effect of environmental identity further indicates that compassion fade may present a significant psychological barrier to building broad public support for addressing these problems. Our results highlight the importance of bringing findings from the field of judgment and decision making to bear on pressing societal issues.
Subfields: Applied Psychology, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/142b5a2362f101712f179839233036a96a60a37b
Citations in the corpus
- How social norms are often a barrier to addressing climate change but can be part of the solution (2020, unknown): “Yet larger numbers of victims often lead people to respond less compassionately (Slovic, 2010), including to victims of climate change (Markowitz et al., 2013), diminishing the effectiveness of concern for others in motivating an effective personal response.”
- Climate visuals: A mixed methods investigation of public perceptions of climate images in three countries (2016, unknown): “The importance of credible and authentic human subjects Results are consistent with past research indicating that imagery containing people tends to be more powerful, and that people respond more strongly to photos of one individual rather than many (Markowtiz et al., 2013; Nicholson-Cole, 2005; Slo”