Two Tragedies at Sea, Two Different Responses Understood through the Arithmetic of Compassion

Migrants gather in a shelter after rescue from a ship that was sinking off the south coast of Pylos, Greece on June 14, 2023. Photo Credit: Angelos Tzortzinis/Pool via REUTERS

By Maili Smith

In the wake of the disappearance of the Titan submersible and the shipwreck of over 750 refugees in Mediterranean Sea, many media articles are picking up on the disconnect between the attention and resources provided to these two events. Even Former President Barack Obama criticized the uneven coverage of the two tragedies for representing “obscene inequality.”

The Titan is a story of suspense and mystery with cultural connotations to the most popular shipwreck in history. Many people are more enraptured by updates on the submersible than stories about migration and mass refugee crises that are becoming increasingly common. Still, the recent shipwreck off the south coast of Greece is one of the most devastating ever reported in the Mediterranean Sea, with over 78 people reported dead and hundreds of people still missing. 

An NBC News article notes that “thousands more articles appeared to have been published about the submersible than about the migrant boat, ‘yet, it’s 100 times as many people who are feared to have lost their lives and these people, they were forced to flee their homes, they were looking for safety.”’

These discrepancies in public attention can be understood through a flawed arithmetic of compassion. People are limited by psychological and cognitive biases that hinder our ability to conceptualize tragedy on a large scale. These underlying thought processes combine with perceptions of class and race to produce different responses. In a recent opinion piece for the Messenger, 5 Explorers Versus 500 Migrants: Why Compassion Doesn’t Scale, Paul Slovic uses the lens of the Arithmetic of Compassion to explain why these two tragedies at sea capture our collective conscious differently.

Highlighted by the reception of these two crises, a greater number of victims does not correspond to an increased amount of attention or outrage. In a phenomenon known as psychic numbing, our feelings of compassion fade as we lose grasp of individual faces and identities. Research provides the unsettling insight that on a large scale, human nature can reduce individuals to statistics.

Five male billionaires are more conceptualizable than a boatful of faceless refugees. In an AP News article covering these events, sociology professor Tim Rueber, said that people are drawn towards stories that allow them to empathize with others, and it’s easier to empathize with smaller numbers of people. Using the generic terminology of “migrants” and grouping the people obscures individual identities in politicized narratives about immigration.

As a recent opinion piece by the Guardian highlights, the coverage of the Greek shipwreck “pales in comparison to the attention that’s been given to the Titan’s disappearance. The rescue efforts also couldn’t be more different: a frantic rush to save five wealthy people versus a shoulder shrug at the idea of 100 children dead at the bottom of the sea.”

Upon the news of the missing submersible, the US government promptly deployed crews to scour the underwater where the craft disappeared. In contrast, hundreds of people who were shipwrecked still remain unaccounted for, which many critics attribute to a half-hearted response from the Greek government. The prominence effect encapsulates this choice to default to an action that has a clearly defensible attribute, perhaps at the cost of other trade-offs. For example, the Greek Coast Guard failed to rescue the sinking boat before it sank, claiming that the “smugglers” in control of the boat refused help. A source of help defaulted to inaction in the face of the crisis, due to the migrant identity of the victims and trepidation to get entangled in politics.

A large-scale shipwreck of a boat carrying hundreds of refugees in the Mediterranean is not unique. The International Organization of Migration has reported more than 27,000 missing migrants in the Mediterranean since 2014. However, rather than captivating public attention as a concerning trend, many people turn away, feeling powerless. Pseudoinefficacy explains the quick response to rescue the Titan expedition, which felt like a tangible way to save five individuals, compared to responses to mass migration crises, which elicit a sense of powerlessness due to the scale and depth of the situation.