How the brain reacts to large-scale tragedies, why for us the death of one person is a tragedy, and the death of millions is statistics and what does our animal instincts have to do with it.
Do you remember the famous saying of Bernard Shaw: "a newspaper is a newspaper that does not see the difference between the fall of a bicycle and the collapse of civilization"? But about newspapers, everything has been clear with them for a long time, but what about us? Imagine being shown tomorrow a newspaper article describing a terrible fire. Do you think you would be more upset if you read that 10,000 or 5 people died in this fire?
The scenario presented now involves people in the so-called affective forecasting - an assumption about their own emotions in a particular future situation. We expect that the news of the death of tens of thousands will sadden us more than the news of the death of several people.
But in reality something quite different is happening. Suffice it to recall the recent events in France, when the death of 12 journalists from Charlie Hebdo caused a real panic in Europe, and the points of view on this event were divided into polar ones: some talked about how “the entire civilized world was shocked”, others raised the question of “double standards of kindness”of the world community and actively recalled dozens of cases with hundreds and thousands of victims, which the world community did not care about. But there is no point in talking about the ethical side of the issue, here is what is interesting: why we, so compassionate in our forecasts, in fact do not distinguish between 12 and 12,000.
However, this question worries scientists too. For example, social psychologists Elizabeth W. Dunn and Claire Ashton-James conducted an interesting study to test the consistency of the predictions people make about their feelings and reality. The participants were divided into two groups. Representatives of the first group were given short announcements of large newspaper articles, which contained different data: somewhere it was said about a terrible tragedy in which 5 people were victims, in other announcements it was about 10,000 dead. The forecasters were then asked how they would rate their disorder on a scale of one to nine from the news they received. It is predictable that people who learned about the several thousand victims suggested a more sad reaction than those who ended up in the hands of announcements listing several of the victims.
However, not all so simple. Remember we have another group? So, a control group of participants, called "experimenters", were asked to read newspaper articles in full and immediately talk about their feelings. That is, these participants did not predict their emotional reaction, but described their current state. Contrary to expectations, it turned out that in reality the feelings of those who read about the 10,000 victims did not differ from those who read about the low number of victims. Researchers call this effect "emotional illiteracy."
This study perfectly illustrates the anecdotal observation that our emotions choose to ignore numerical information. In a well-known quote, mistakenly attributed to Joseph Stalin, the following thought sounds: "The death of one person is a tragedy, the death of millions is statistics." But even without this, there are plenty of examples that the rumor about a small number of suffering people has a more powerful effect on a person than large-scale tragedies.
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But why, then, are the people in the forecaster group wrongly predicting their feelings, believing that they will be more upset by more victims? The answer is worth looking for in the mysteries of the evolution of our brain. Recently, the theory of two systems of thought is gaining strength, according to which our brain is a kind of conglomeration of old structures ("old brain") and new structures ("new brain"). The "old brain" is evolutionarily older, it came to us from ancient ancestors and has practically not changed over the entire existence of mankind. This is the part of our brain that most closely resembles the brain of animals. This is why, for example, we were able to learn so much about the human visual system by studying this system in a cat. The old brain is primarily concerned with perception, action, and emotion and is located closer to the back of the brain. The "new brain" is located in the frontal areas (prefrontal cortex) and is commonly believed to specialize in self-control, assessing facts, analyzing - everything that involves step-by-step thinking. From an evolutionary point of view, this "new brain" is very recent (this theory of the binary system was popularized in 2011 by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking: Fast and Slow).
Given this information, one of the explanations for the results of the study by Dunn and Ashton-James may be the use of different parts of the brain in predicting (here the rational system is turned on) and describing current feelings (as you remember, the "old brain" is responsible for them). When we ask our brain about the forecast, it begins to reasonably think that more dead people should cause great sadness, so to speak (after all, he quickly counted, compared, estimated). But in these rational calculations, the “new brain” misses the features of the work of its older brother, in which there is neither criticism nor the ability to make calculations and understand that 10,000 and 5 are not the same thing at all.
Realizing the tragedy of the "elder brain", Dunn and Ashton-James decided to "translate" the mass death of people into a language accessible to our ancient illiterate system of thought. To do this, they conducted another experiment, in which people were not told about the number of victims, but were shown photographs of the dead. More precisely, the participants were again divided: some of them also read about the deaths of 15 or 500 people, while others saw real photographs of all the dead people (in fact, these were living people disguised as the dead, but these photos were presented to the participants in the experiment as genuine). Looking at real pictures of the death of hundreds of people and simply receiving information about death, people reacted in different ways. In the group in which the images were shown, not a trace of "emotional illiteracy" remained. Acquaintance with photos of 500 deceased people made the participants much more depressed than after viewing photos of 15 victims. What, what, and visual information, the old brain still perfectly knows how to process.
But in this regard, the last question remains: is there a quantitative limit, a kind of value limit, beyond which we simply cease to emotionally react to the news of death? A study by Professors Dunn and Ashton-James showed that for a person there is a qualitative difference between acquaintance with 15 tragic photographs and five hundred of the same. What about comparing 9,000 photographs with 90,000 horrible pictures? Cognitive scientist Jim Davis is confident that such a comparison is unlikely to cause any emotion in a person. He compares the human brain to a kind of detector that aims to track the big picture. Imagine, he says, that you start drawing small dots on a large wall: eventually you will no longer see individual dots and you will not see a wall with dots, but a wall with patterned wallpaper. Likely,the texture of tiny images of dead people will not cause an emotional outburst in the beholder, because he will not think about people as such, but will represent a certain image, an abstract picture. Davis concludes:
In general, the conclusion suggests itself very standard: to understand the true tragedy of mass deaths (of which there are many today - it does not matter, from murders, accidents or catastrophes) is a sign that we really evolved and learned to understand reality somewhat differently than ours did. ingenuous animal ancestors. However, we also should not forget about their experience and periodically turn on our “old brain” in order to understand: the tragedy in the next house deserves attention no less than the “bloody action” that television provides us with every day. Yes, no less, although every day this whole story seems more and more confusing.
Adapted from: "The Death of Hundreds Is Just a Statistic-But It Doesn't Have to Be", Nautil.us