“If I look at the mass I will never act”: Psychic numbing and genocide

By Paul Slovic. 2007

843 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, General Health Professions, Cognitive Science & Psychology, Philosophy, Social Sciences & Humanities

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Citations in the corpus

Anticipating Safety Issues in E2E Conversational AI: Framework and Tooling (2021, background): “For instance, people tend to have trouble comprehending large numbers and respond more to representative narratives (Slovic, 2010).”
Guiding the Release of Safer E2E Conversational AI through Value Sensitive Design (2022, background): “…heuristics – such as the fact that people tend to have trouble comprehending large numbers and have more of a response to representative narratives (Slovic, 2010) – but also population biases in risk estimation, where white men are often outliers in how they (under)estimate risks (Finucane et…”
The identifiable victim effect: a meta-analytic review (2016, background): “In particular, affective feelings are germane to explaining decision- making in helping situations such as those relevant to IVE (Batson, 2011; Slovic, 2007).”
When Job Performance is All Relative: How Family Motivation Energizes Effort and Compensates for Intrinsic Motivation (2017, positive): “…groups, which is conducive to greater perceived identification 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 8 and impact (Slovic, 2007; Small, Loewenstein, & Slovic, 2007).”
Affect, Moral Intuition, and Risk (2010, background): “But a cautionary note comes from a study in which people who had just participated in a paid psychological experiment were given the opportunity to contribute up to $5 of their earnings to the charity Save the Children (Small, Loewenstein, & Slovic, 2007).”
The Scarecrow and the Tin Man: The Vicissitudes of Human Sympathy and Caring (2007, background): “Slovic (2007) reminds that ignoring genocide is a repeated phenomenon, and the prevention of it has never been made a top priority of the U.”
Exemplars and nudges: Combining two strategies for moral education (2018, neutral): “By contrast, using abstract and impersonal data creates less emotional involvement and even ‘psychic numbing’ (Slovic, 2007).”
Emotional reactions, perceived impact and perceived responsibility mediate the identifiable victim effect, proportion dominance effect and in-group effect respectively (2015, background): “Although other mechanisms have been suggested to underlie the IVE, feelings and affect (broadly defined) are the clearly most commonly discussed (Slovic, 2007).”
One or Many? The Influence of Episodic and Thematic Climate Change Frames on Policy Preferences and Individual Behavior Change (2011, background): “This differs from the work of Slovic (2007) and Kogut & Ritov (2005a, 2005b) by changing both the type of exemplar (polar bears vs. children) and the ability of the participant to directly help the victim.”
The Impact of Climate Change–Related Imagery and Text on Public Opinion and Behavior Change (2016, background): “Research investigating how individuals may process information through analytic and experiential cognitive systems has found that imagery is often processed in a more experiential, intuitive fashion (Slovic, 2007).”
The Psychology of Charitable Donations to Disaster Victims and Beyond (2015, background): “When speaking of big groups, it is even more apparent that dry statistics fail to spark those emotions necessary to propel people into acting (Slovic, 2007).”
Modeling the interplay between affect and deliberation. (2015, background): “…deaths differently than identifiable ones, since foreknowledge of who will die (or which group deaths will come from) creates a more vivid—and evocative—image of the consequences (see Schelling, 1968; Bohnet & Frey, 1999; Slovic, 2007, Small & Loewenstein, 2003, for an experimental demonstration).”
Anthropomorphized species as tools for conservation: utility beyond prosocial, intelligent and suffering species (2013, background): “Slovic (2007) claims that most people will exert great effort to help alleviate individual suffering.”
Boomerang Effects in Science Communication (2012, background): “) possibly influencing the degree of social identification between the reader and victims/exemplars highlighted within the message (Kogut & Ritov, 2005a, 2005b; Slovic, 2007).”
Compassion fade and the challenge of environmental conservation (2013, positive): “For example, decision-makers may show greater compassion towards a single victim in part because a single individual elicits an inherently stronger affective response than does a group (Kogut & Ritov, 2005; Slovic, 2007).”