Quote:
Originally Posted by Iggy City
Number of casualties: More people care about a mass death than a lone one.
|
Interestingly, in general, the exact OPPOSITE is true. A number of studies have been done to verify this; we by and large care more about one death than a hundred, even if the hundred includes the one person we originally cared more about.
Paul Slovic has done a bunch of work on this (eg
http://globaljustice.uoregon.edu/fil...ld-1wda5u6.pdf or
http://www.apa.org/science/about/psa...11/slovic.aspx), and it's been more recently popularized by Paul Bloom's crusade against empathy, which is the source of this disconnect.