Remembering names beyond numbers — The Arithmetic of Compassion

Commentary by Paul Slovic

April 7 marks the 30th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, where some 800,000 Tutsis were murdered in 100-days while the world watched and did little to intervene. In 2019, the 25th anniversary of this horrific event, I and others were shown a gallery of photographs from the genocide archives and asked to select one and reflect on it. I selected a photo of victims’ names. We reprint it here to commemorate the 30th anniversary.

“… (in war) the first step away from a person’s name is the first step toward killing him without thinking too much about it.” Nick McDonnell.

Listing victims’ names has special importance. A person’s name identifies them as a fellow human being, whose life, like our own, is important. The high value we place upon individual lives is demonstrated by the strenuous actions we often take to protect single individuals , sometimes strangers, who are in danger, even when doing so poses great risk to ourselves. The individual does not even have to be a human being to engender this respect and protection.

Some years ago, a boat was stranded near Hawaii due to engine trouble. All the passengers were evacuated from the vessel and then, unattended, it drifted away. Someone remembered that there was a dog left aboard the boat, with a name. Some $300,000 was spent to locate the ship and rescue the dog.

I’m a psychologist who studies how we value human lives and decide when to act to protect them—or not to protect them. We call the great importance that we place on protecting individual lives the singularity effect. Opposite singularity is a response, psychic numbing, which happens when the threat is great - many individuals are at risk - and the information about the threat to their lives is communicated to us not with their names but rather as statistics. What we have learned from experience as well as from scientific research, is that it is hard to appreciate the humanity that numbers represent. As someone aptly said, “statistics are human beings with the tears dried off”. Another similarly observed “One man’s death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic”. These oft cited expressions convey a harsh insight into what psychologists have described as a flawed and deadly “arithmetic of compassion”. In contrast to individual deaths, which are emotionally wrenching, numerical data are numbing in that they fail to spark the feelings and emotions that are needed to motivate us to act. Nowhere was this more evident than in Rwanda, where the information communicated about imminent, and then actual, genocide was not deemed important enough to motivate intervention.

This bias in our humanitarian accounting has been documented in numerous psychological experiments on life-saving behavior, showing that our intuitive feelings—which we trust to guide us in making all manner of decisions—are innumerate. As the number of lives at risk increases, an effect called “psychic numbing” begins to desensitize us. A single life at risk is tremendously concerning to us, even more so when the person is named. But that life feels less valuable to protect if it is part of a larger tragedy, with many lives endangered. You probably won’t feel any more concerned learning about a threat to 6 lives than you feel about a threat to 5 lives, unless you pause, do the arithmetic, and realize that there is one additional, and valuable, life at risk. Even worse, in some cases, the more who die, the less we care. As the numbers mount, our feelings of compassion may collapse entirely.

Listing the names of the deceased is important as it honors their memory. But it is important as well in another way. We can prevent and halt genocides, but the first step is to care enough to make the hard and often dangerous effort this requires. Names are important in this regard. They remind us that, when informed of imminent or impending mass atrocities, we must think of the individuals at risk, with names, faces, families, and valued lives,, like our own, so as not to be lulled into complacency and inaction by the numbing arithmetic of compassion. To paraphrase what someone once said about the Holocaust, “It’s not that there were six million Jews killed by the Nazis, but rather one person, killed, again and again, six million times”.

And that person had a name.