Psychic numbing
The more who suffer, the less we are able to feel.
What it means
Psychic numbing is the diminishing emotional response to suffering as the number of victims grows, so that affect, the feeling that motivates concern and action, fails to scale and can even decline as casualties rise into the hundreds, thousands, or millions. It stems from the fact that emotion responds vividly to a single identifiable individual but treats large numbers as abstract statistics that the feeling system cannot represent. The result is the disturbing pattern in which 'the more who die, the less we care,' contributing to inaction in the face of genocide, famine, and mass tragedy. It is closely tied to scope insensitivity, the identifiable victim effect, and compassion fade, and it poses a deep challenge for humanitarian appeals and policy. Slovic frames it as a fundamental deficiency in how feelings inform moral judgment about large-scale harm.
Examples
A photograph of one drowned child can galvanize the world, while reports of hundreds of thousands killed elicit a numb shrug.
One crash that kills a local family leads the news for days; the year's road toll of thousands appears as a line in a report almost nobody reads.
A hospital raises the money for one named child's transplant in a weekend, while its appeal for the ward that treats a thousand children a year goes quietly unmet.
First described in Robert Jay Lifton; developed for valuation by Paul Slovic (2007).