Shankar Vedantam tells a disturbing story about a dog at sea to raise a serious question about how we humans prioritize our charitable endeavors.

A fire broke out in the engine room of the Insiko 1907, an unregistered tanker, as it passed about 800 miles south of the Hawaiian Islands. The fire swept through the ship so quickly that the crew wasn’t even able to radio for help.

When the fire subsided, 11 men and the captain’s dog found themselves safe, with good supplies of food and water, in the ship’s forward quarters. But they had no engines, no radio, and no means for contacting the outside world.

So the ship drifted aimlessly for days, eventually coming within 220 miles of Hawaii–at which point a cruise ship picked up the crew. Hokget, the dog, however, was left behind.

One of the cruise ship passengers who heard Hokget barking called the Hawaiian Humane Society to see if they would do something to rescue him. The Society alerted fishing boats, but the operation seemed hopeless.

As Vedantam explains,

The problem . . . was that no one knew where the Insiko was. The U.S. Coast Guard estimated it could be anywhere in an area measuring 360,000 square miles.

I don’t need to tell the whole story. A month and a half after the fire broke out, and over $300,000 of private and public taxpayer money later, Hokget was finally rescued.

In the meantime, letters and contributions had poured into the Humane Society from 39 states and four foreign countries. One was a check for $5,000. The notes expressed deep anguish and concern:

“This check is in memory of the little dog lost at sea.”

“Thank you for pulling my heartstrings and for reminding me of all the hope there is left in this world.”

And so forth.

This episode raises a series of disturbing questions, however, writes Vedantam.

Having just watched Hotel Rwanda, I agree:

“Eight years before the Hokget saga began, the same world that showed extraordinary compassion for a dog sat on its hands as hundreds of thousands of human beings were killed in the Rwandan genocide.” Why? “Why have successive generations done so little to halt suffering on such a large scale” even while they pour out unending resources for a dog, a kitten, one little lost child?

What’s going on?

Vedantam, following the lead of philosopher Peter Singer, suggests its precisely because we humans are not wired to comprehend mass suffering. We are wired to empathize with “just one” or maybe “two.”

Hokget did not draw our sympathies because we care more about dogs than people; she drew our sympathies because she was a single dog lost on the biggest ocean in the world. Our hidden brain—my term for a host of unconscious mental processes that subtly bias our judgment—shapes our compassion into a telescope. We are best able to respond when we are focused on a single victim.

We don’t feel 20 times sadder when we hear that 20 people have died in a disaster than when we hear that one person has died, even though the magnitude of the tragedy is 20 times as large. We can reach such a conclusion abstractly, in our conscious minds, but we cannot feel it viscerally, because the hidden brain is simply not calibrated to deal with the difference between a single death and 20 deaths. But the paradox does not end there. Even if 10 deaths do not make us feel 10 times as sad as a single death, shouldn’t we feel at least twice as sad? There is disturbing evidence that shows we may actually care less. I suspect that if the Insiko had been carrying 100 dogs, many people would have cared less about their fate than they did about Hokget. One hundred dogs do not have a single face, a single name, a single life story around which we can wrap our imaginations and our compassion.

Vedantam tells the story of a series of experiments conducted by psychologist Paul Slovic of the University of Oregon (retold in Insensitivity to the value of human life: A study of psychophysical numbing, pp. 78-80).

I will significantly oversimplify the study. But subjects were told they had options to build roads, improve employment, or save the lives of 4,500 Rwandan refugees by providing clean water for their refugee camp. The options were presented in different orders to ensure preferences didn’t happen to be skewed by order. The Rwandan refugee camp option was also mixed with a second variable: some participants in the study were told that they could save 4,500 Rwandan refugees in a camp of 11,000. Other participants were told they could save 4,500 Rwandan refugees in a camp of 250,000.

Which option do you think garnered the most interest?

I imagine you guessed right: The 4,500-out-of-11,000 option was dramatically more popular than the option of saving 4,500 out of 250,000 refugees.

In another experiment, Slovic asked people to imagine they were disbursing money on behalf of a large foundation: They could give $10 million to fight a disease that claimed 20,000 lives a year — and save 10,000 of those lives. But they could also devote the $10 million to fight a disease that claimed 290,000 lives a year — and this investment would save 20,000 lives.

Slovic found that people preferred to spend the money saving the 10,000 lives in the first scenario rather than the 20,000 lives in the second scenario: “People were responding not to the number of lives saved but the percentage of lives saved,” he said.

Emphasis mine–JAH. Quote from a Washington Post article.

When I finished reading these stories and statistics, it hit me: Those of us with resources need to force ourselves to break through these kinds of psychological barriers and look with clear eyes at the long-term strategic projects in which we permit ourselves to become involved.

Just one minor example: An earthquake devastates Haiti. A couple of hundred thousand people may have died. “All” your friends and neighbors are moved to give–generously–to help the victims.

Meanwhile, two years ago you committed yourself and your limited assets to do what you could, over time, to alleviate some of the key factors that contribute to the deaths of three million children in India every year.

Should you abandon your Indian project for the sake of the Haitians?

It will take a lot of willpower and counter-social pressure to maintain your philanthropic trajectory. . . .

I would like to suggest that sticking with your preconceived purpose may, indeed, be exactly what you should do.

Think about it.

Oh. And while you’re at it, notice how the charities try to appeal to you. “Just because” one charity knows how to tell a good, emotionally gripping, illustrative story of one person, one child, who is being helped by its services, should it win your allegiance over another that–for whatever reason–doesn’t tell the stories of “ones” but, instead, speaks in numbers?

********

Some additional articles along lines similar to what I mention above:

Psychic Numbing and Genocide

If I look at the mass I will never act

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