Ep. 5 - Where Does Your Empathy End?

Why do certain things pull your heartstrings and others might as well be bird poop on your windshield? Carrie and Doug get into your empathy centers, what they do, where they come from, and how they operate for good on small scales and large. Effective altruism, compassion fade, mass suffering, and political policies and causes are all on the docket to discuss and it gets fussy!! Discussed studies: -2005, Kogut & Ritov, “The ‘Identified Victim’ Effect: An Identified Group, or Just a Single Individual?” -2007, Small, Loewenstein & Slovic, “Sympathy and Callousness: The Impact of Deliberative Thought on Donations to Identifiable and Statistical Victims,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. -2007, Slovic, “If I look at the mass I will never act: Psychic numbing and genocide,” Judgment and Decision Making. -2014, Västfjäll, Slovic & Peters “Compassion Fade: Affect and Charity Are Greatest for a Single Identifiable Victim,” PLOS ONE