An honest deep dive into empathy, psychic numbing and the arithmetic of compassion

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In the beginning, every death still had a face.

I remember the first weeks of the pandemic vividly. No one in the hospital where I work had been vaccinated, there was no vaccine yet. The first deaths appeared on the evening news. I watched, and my breath caught. This is deadly, I thought. I grieved with every person who died, with every family. Colleagues walked around with deep pressure marks on their faces from the masks. Every name, every story landed.

And then there were more. And more. And more.

There came a moment, and I’m almost ashamed to write it down this plainly, when it became almost ordinary that someone died. The conversation was no longer about one human being, but about capacity, about beds, about where to keep the dead because there was no more room. A mother, a father, a child, a grandfather: they were there, and at the same time they vanished behind the next number.

Until I myself struggled to breathe for a few days. And for the first time I thought: maybe I’ll soon be one of those figures that scroll past on the news every night.

In that moment I understood something uncomfortable about the human mind. Something science has a name for.

The face and the number

Imagine two messages.

In the first, you read about Rokia, a seven year old girl from Mali. You see her photo. She is hungry. Your gift goes straight to her.

In the second, you read that millions of children are starving across the Sahel. Numbers, percentages, a map.

Who gets your money?

Almost everyone chooses Rokia. And here’s the uncomfortable part: that is the exact opposite of what arithmetic would prescribe. The one girl moves us; the millions leave us, honestly, largely cold.

This is not a character flaw of bad people. It happens precisely to the good, caring ones. Psychologist Paul Slovic gave it a name that sticks: psychic numbing, a gradual numbing of feeling as the numbers grow. He borrowed the title of his famous 2007 paper from a line he attributes to Mother Teresa: “If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.” (Whether Mother Teresa actually said this is, by the way, hard to prove, I present it the way Slovic himself does.)

Rokia: how one girl moves us more than a whole continent

The Rokia example isn’t a fiction. It comes from a real experiment by Deborah Small, George Loewenstein and Paul Slovic (2007). Participants who read about one identifiable child gave more than those presented with the same need as statistics. More striking still: as soon as the researchers added facts and figures, generosity dropped. Thinking about numbers cooled the feeling.

A few years earlier, Tehila Kogut and Ilana Ritov (2005) had found something similar, but even sharper. One identified child evoked more than a group of eight identified children. It wasn’t identification itself doing the work, but singularity, what they called the singularity effect. One face is a whole universe; eight faces already become a crowd.

An honest caveat belongs here, because it makes this story stronger rather than weaker. In 2024, a research team tried to measure this classic effect again (a replication in the same field), and they did not find it in the same form. That doesn’t mean the whole idea is nonsense; the broader pattern of “the one over the many” has been found in many studies. But it does mean we should be careful with confident claims. Psychology is not exact physics. An honest story shows those cracks.

The arithmetic of compassion

Slovic summed it up in a line you can’t shake: the more who die, the less we care.

That sounds monstrous. And yet you might recognise it.

The difference between zero and one victim feels enormous. The difference between one and two already feels smaller. And the difference between 87 and 88 deaths? We barely feel it at all. Our feelings respond beautifully to the first life, and then go almost deaf to every life after it. Daniel Västfjäll and colleagues (2014) even showed that the cooling can begin at the second child. They aptly named it compassion fade: compassion that dims.

You may know the line: “One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.” It’s almost always attributed to Stalin. But almost none of that holds up. The earliest version appears in a 1925 text by the German journalist Kurt Tucholsky, spoken by an unnamed French diplomat. Russian historians find no trace of the line in Stalin’s words. Even Steven Pinker calls the quote “falsely attributed to Stalin”, and adds that, however false the source, it does capture a real fact about human psychology. A fine lesson: a quote can be fake and true at the same time. Which is why I prefer to check the source.

A Stone Age brain

Why is our feeling built this way? Part of the answer lies very far back.

For most of human history we lived in small groups. You could see one sick child, one wounded hunter, one hungry neighbour. You simply couldn’t see ten thousand victims, they didn’t exist in your world. Our empathy system seems built for individuals and familiar faces, not for millions of strangers or a climate statistic.

Anthropologist Robin Dunbar proposed in 1992 that humans can maintain stable bonds with only a limited number of people, a figure that became famous as “Dunbar’s number”, often rounded to about 150.

And here, too, honesty belongs: that number is contested. A 2021 reanalysis using different statistical methods produced wildly different results and concluded that naming any single number is essentially “futile”. So: the idea that our social and emotional bandwidth is limited stands on reasonably firm ground. The precise figure “150” is far shakier than the posters on LinkedIn would have you believe.

The core holds, and it is both moving and uncomfortable: maybe we don’t fail because we are bad people. Maybe we are trying to comprehend a world of eight billion people with a brain shaped in small groups.

Aylan: the boy on the beach

On 2 September 2015, a photograph travelled around the world: a three year old Syrian boy, Aylan Kurdi, lifeless with his small face in the sand of a Turkish beach. At that very moment, hundreds of thousands had already died in Syria. But it was this one child that briefly woke the world.

Slovic and colleagues (2017) did something remarkable: they measured what happened next. Donations to a Swedish Red Cross fund for Syrian refugees surged. The number of people signing up for a monthly gift grew nearly tenfold in a single month.

And then, within a few weeks, everything fell back. The deaths kept coming. The attention did not. Aylan’s own father would later say his son had died “for nothing”.

That is psychic numbing, live and measured. Not in a lab, but in the real world. One face can wake us. But it doesn’t keep us awake.

The dark side of empathy

So far it sounds as if we simply need more empathy. But one thinker draws a line through that, and he deserves to be taken seriously.

Psychologist Paul Bloom wrote a book with a provocative title: Against Empathy (2016). His point is not that we should become cruel. His point is that empathy, feeling with one other person, is a poor compass for moral decisions.

He compares empathy to a spotlight. A spotlight makes one spot shine — and leaves everything else in the dark. Because of that, Bloom argues, empathy is:

• innumerate: it can’t count, and almost always chooses the one over the many;
• partial: we feel more for those who resemble us, speak our language, share our faith or our convictions;
• short-sighted: it rewards what is felt now, not what matters in the long run.

And — most uncomfortable of all, empathy can even fuel violence. Deep empathy for “our” people can stoke hatred toward those who harm them. A gripping story about one victim has, through the ages, been used to justify entire wars.

Bloom’s alternative he calls rational compassion: kindness and care, but steered by thinking rather than by whoever happens to catch our spotlight most brightly.

You don’t have to agree with Bloom entirely, many researchers don’t. A world without empathy has no engine, after all. But his warning stands: empathy alone is not a moral compass.

Who decides which child gets a face?

And then there is a question that, personally, occupies me most.

Because who actually decides which child gets a face?

Not reality. Reality is a dull, endless stream of suffering. It is journalists, photographers, editors, activists, politicians and, increasingly, algorithms that choose which story you see on your screen today, and which thousand stories you never get to see at all.

Look at the wars of this moment. Some fill our screens for months. Others, think of Sudan, with one of the largest displacement crises in the world, remain largely invisible, despite enormous numbers of victims. The suffering does not scale with the attention. The camera chooses. And our empathy follows the camera.

That is not a political statement; it is a psychological fact. Whoever tells the story largely steers where our compassion goes. And that gives the teller, human or algorithm, a great deal of power. Power we are rarely aware of.

Arendt: the danger isn’t coldness, but thoughtlessness

When Hannah Arendt attended the trial of Nazi official Adolf Eichmann in 1961, she expected to see a monster. Instead she saw a grey, ordinary bureaucrat. Out of that came her famous, and often misunderstood, phrase: the banality of evil.

Arendt’s point was not that evil is harmless. Her point was subtler, and all the more frightening for it. The greatest danger, she saw, was not a lack of feeling. It was thoughtlessness, the capacity to stop thinking from another person’s standpoint. Not coldness, but the switching-off of the imagination.

That fits painfully well with everything above. Psychic numbing is, in a sense, a mild, everyday version of exactly that: we stop imagining the human being behind the number. Not out of wickedness. Out of self-protection, overload, habit.

The remedy, then, is perhaps not “feel more”, our brain simply can’t. The remedy is rather: keep thinking. Keep, very deliberately, imagining the one face behind the number, even when the numbers grow too large to feel.

The hardest question

I want to end with the question this whole story, I think, turns on. Not: why do we save one child and forget a thousand strangers?

But: would you want the world to treat you as a statistic?

Because that’s where the tension sits. Rationally, we know every human is worth the same. But if your child falls ill, you don’t want to be “one of thousands”. You want to be seen. As a whole universe, not as a line in a table.

That is what I learned when I lay short of breath in bed for a few days myself. To the statistics I was a possible number. To myself I was everything I know. And behind every number in those evening broadcasts sat exactly the same: someone with memories, children, parents, fears, plans for next week.

Maybe that’s the most honest thing we can do. Not pretend we can feel eight billion people at once, we can’t. But, now and then, very deliberately, put a face back behind one number.

Which thousand people did you not see today, simply because they had no face?

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This article is about psychology and is not medical or psychological advice. If you are struggling with low mood, anxiety or overwhelm after distressing events, please talk to your GP or a treating specialist.

Related reading

• Your Brain Is Not an Honest Witness
• The Quiet Brain and the Loud Brain
• Why One “No” Erases All Your “Yeses”

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Sources

• Slovic, P. (2007). “If I look at the mass I will never act”: Psychic numbing and genocide. Judgment and Decision Making, 2(2), 79–95. (open access)
• Small, D. A., Loewenstein, G., & Slovic, P. (2007). Sympathy and callousness: The impact of deliberative thought on donations to identifiable and statistical victims. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 102(2), 143–153. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2006.01.005
• Kogut, T., & Ritov, I. (2005). The singularity effect of identified victims in separate and joint evaluations. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 97(2), 106–116. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2005.02.003
• Kogut, T., & Ritov, I. (2005). The “identified victim” effect: an identified group, or just a single individual? Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 18(3), 157–167. https://doi.org/10.1002/bdm.492
• Västfjäll, D., Slovic, P., Mayorga, M., & Peters, E. (2014). Compassion fade: Affect and charity are greatest for a single child in need. PLOS ONE, 9(6), e100115. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0100115
• Slovic, P., Västfjäll, D., Erlandsson, A., & Gregory, R. (2017). Iconic photographs and the ebb and flow of empathic response to humanitarian disasters. PNAS, 114(4), 640–644. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1613977114
• Dunbar, R. I. M. (1992). Neocortex size as a constraint on group size in primates. Journal of Human Evolution, 22(6), 469–493. https://doi.org/10.1016/0047-2484(92)90081-J
• Lindenfors, P., Wartel, A., & Lind, J. (2021). ‘Dunbar’s number’ deconstructed. Biology Letters, 17(5), 20210158. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2021.0158
• Bloom, P. (2016). Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion. New York: Ecco/HarperCollins.
• Arendt, H. (1963). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Viking Press.
• Pinker, S. (2011). The Better Angels of Our Nature. (on the false attribution of the “Stalin” quote) — earliest source: K. Tucholsky, “Französischer Witz” (1925).
• Failed replication (singularity/identified-victim effect): “Revisiting the impact of singularity on the Identified Victim Effect” (2024), Judgment and Decision Making.