I’ve always found close up pictures of Hiroshima victims to be some of the most affecting images I’ve ever seen, and yet knowing that 100,000* people were vaporized in a fraction of a second has less emotional effect. We also get numb to hearing about steady numbers of deaths that add up to a lot over time, like car accidents. I’m not a monster – this is a bug in human psychology. This article in Axios gives other examples of the phenomenon, from the Holocaust to the Rwanda genocide to the U.S. coronavirus meltdown. The article links to an academic paper by Paul Slovic at the University of Oregon, who studies this “psychic numbing” effect.

A defining element of catastrophes is the magnitude of their harmful consequences. To help society prevent or mitigate damage from catastrophes, immense effort and technological sophistication are often employed to assess and communicate the size and scope of potential or actual losses. This effort assumes that people can understand the resulting numbers and act on them appropriately. However, recent behavioral research casts doubt on this fundamental assumption. Many people do not understand large numbers. Indeed, large numbers have been found to lack meaning and to be underweighted in decisions unless they convey affect (feeling). As a result, there is a paradox that rational models of decision making fail to represent. On the one hand, we respond strongly to aid a single individual in need. On the other hand, we often fail to prevent mass tragedies – such as genocide – or take appropriate measures to reduce potential losses from natural disasters. We believe this occurs, in part, because as numbers get larger and larger, we become insensitive; numbers fail to trigger the emotion or feeling necessary to motivate action. We shall address this problem of insensitivity to mass tragedy by identifying certain circumstances in which it compromises the rationality of our actions and by pointing briefly to strategies that might lessen or overcome this problem.

The More Who Die, the Less We Care: Psychic Numbing and Genocide

I’ve often thought about a class that would teach the history of a war or tragedy by the numbers, by focusing on the number of deaths, who the people were, where they occurred and when they occurred. I think that would be educational (if depressing). But to put it in perspective you might need some visuals. One idea would be a stadium with people vanishing from seats. (This would work for, say, up to 100,000 deaths.) For even larger numbers, maybe you could start with a point in the center of the town where the class is being held or where students live, and then expand the dot outward as though all the people who live inside it were to vanish. You could even make this an app based on census data, and let the user pick the center of the bubble. Then finally, you probably should tie some of the deaths to individual stories, or interviews with survivors, friends and family. For me personally though, the numbers are important to put the emotional stories in context, and I am wary of news stories that don’t have numbers. Morbid stuff!

* Okay, I admit the “100,000 people in a fraction of a second” is just a number I picked somewhat for shock value. According to Wikipedia, 70,000-80,000 people were either vaporized instantly or burned to death shortly after the blast. Then a bunch more died of radiation poisoning of course. Does this make it any better? No, when it’s my turn please just vaporize me.