In one of the great noir cinematic moments, Orson Welles takes Joseph Cotten for a ride on Vienna’s Riesenrad. Welles is Harry Lime, a war-profiteer, killing sick kids by selling dodgy penicillin to hospitals. Cotten asks if he’s ever seen any of his victims. As the two men look down on the crowd from the giant ferris wheel, Welles gives this reply:

Victims? Don’t be melodramatic. Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare?

That spare restatement of a millenia old fact of human nature came to mind when the CJR picked up on a paper by psychologist Paul Slovic. It is called “If I look at the mass I will never act”: Psychic numbing and genocide. They don’t link to his work, but you can read it here. Slovic talks about decades-old journalistic strategies to engage people. So far so dull.

More interesting is his other paper, Sympathy and callousness: The impact of deliberative thought on donations to identifiable and statistical victims. It asks the question posed by axial religions, “Can individuals be taught to value life consistently?” And the answer is:

…our results demonstrate that sympathy for identifiable victims diminishes with deliberative thought, but remains consistently low for statistical victims. This pattern holds with various manipulations of deliberative thought, including explicit debiasing interventions, providing statistics, and priming an analytic mindset.

These findings support the more general notion that certain stimuli naturally evoke more affect than others and that cognitive deliberation can undermine outcomes that typically arise when choices are made affectively. In this case, encouraging people to think about their choices had an unfavorable effect on social welfare.

In other words, Orson Welles was right – but even when you can put a name and a face to suffering, contemplating the plight of the afflicted turns you into a cold-hearted bastard.
Remember that when you want to change the world with your keyboard.