Extinction of compassion is a cognitive bias that refers to a decrease in compassion that is shown to people in need as the number of victims increases. This may be the result of the mental numbness first proposed by Robert Jay Lifton. [Sources: 9]
Psychologist Paul Slovic came up with this phrase after observing that as suffering increases, people’s compassion decreases. Our sympathy for suffering and loss is rapidly falling as more and more victims are presented to us. As the number of victims of the tragedy increases, our sympathy, our willingness to help, reliably decreases. [Sources: 0, 2, 6]
Fading away compassion is the tendency for empathy to diminish as more people need help. Another way to explain the decline in the concept of compassion is to view it as a tendency for empathy to decrease as more people need help. According to psychologist and researcher Paul Slovic, the extinction of compassion is the idea that the more people are affected by tragedy, the less empathy is. This erosion of compassion can significantly impede individual and collective (eg, political) responses to urgent large-scale crises such as genocide, mass famine [5] or severe environmental degradation [32]. [Sources: 4, 5, 11]
The main tenet of this study is that compassion, and therefore concern for society, is often diminished rather than increased in the face of more serious threats. The main purpose of this article is to understand the psychological basis of this perverse phenomenon. In this article, we explore how attention-focused affective feelings may underlie the findings that when it comes to awakening compassion, an individual with a face and name usually elicits a stronger reaction than a group. [Sources: 5]
These results support the idea that the extinction of compassion is an affective phenomenon in which feelings are more pronounced towards individuals or groups perceived as separate units. These discoveries not only expand our understanding of the psychology of compassion, but also offer ways to deal with the loss of feelings as the need increases. The first evidence of this comes from research showing that compassion for victims decreases as the number of people needing help increases [30], the identifiability of victims decreases [31] and the percentage of victims who received assistance decreases [7]. [Sources: 1]
The people who have the most empathy and also tend to experience the most empathic discomfort are actually more likely to experience a collapse of compassion than people who are less important. As I continued to explore the extinction of compassion, I found that people tend to ignore feelings because they are trying to avoid depression or emotional distress. Perhaps fading compassion is partly a way for people to vaccinate themselves so they don’t look deeper into any guilt or shame they may feel because of their privilege and / or contribution to the problem of this wholeness. And this is not an accident of human psychology, it is a real barrier to compassion that can prevent people from doing things that might matter. [Sources: 2, 11]
Compassion collapses not because our ability to empathize or care is so limited, but because we can’t find a way to get to that part of compassion that includes feeling like we have the resources to do something important. which will change the situation. … This is because it has stretched over time, and our common human problem – to understand numbers, to comprehend these numbers – may be one of the reasons why compassion begins to fade. This clarifies the reason why we don’t feel that other people deserve compassion. The statement that “people expect the needs of large groups to be potentially overwhelming” suggests that we consciously consider what this attachment might entail and move away from it, or that we are aware that we are reaching an endpoint of compassion and are beginning to deliberately change. ..classification of the accident from personnel to statistics. [Sources: 2, 10, 11]
The affect heuristic forces people to make decisions based on emotional attachment to a stimulus … It is this emotional element of System 1 that leads us to the effects of compassion disappear when we make decisions based on attachment and the feelings of others. emotion that goes beyond the facts of the situation. [Sources: 4]
As noted below, compassion can also be viewed as having many different feelings and behaviors depending on the context. For example, one of the roots of compassion is caring parenting behavior. As a social attitude, compassion has a flow as we can be compassionate towards others, be open to compassion for others, and be compassionate towards ourselves. Compassion is caused by an awareness of the special suffering and pain of others. [Sources: 3, 7]
Here we experience the absolute spontaneity of compassion that arises beyond all differences and differences, attachments and conceptual structures. We can see boundless compassion that is itself spontaneous, not fabricated, free of concepts or visions of any kind. Usually our most direct experience of compassion is triggered by the awareness of suffering itself. [Sources: 3]
When it seems to be most needed, compassion is felt the least. Affective feelings such as empathy, empathy, sadness and compassion are often viewed as important in motivating help [9], [10]. [Sources: 1, 12]
Since psychotherapy focuses on mental distress, the development of motives and skills of compassion for self and others may be the focus of psychotherapy. In Buddhism, however, compassion is understood as something much more extensive than a simple feeling or emotion, with all the guiding qualities that these words imply. [Sources: 3, 7]
Human compassion has a hard limit. It is one of the most powerful psychological forces that shape human events. The answer—whether it is an overseas refugee crisis or a family health debate—is often related to Paul Slovic. Vocabulary research shows that the human mind is not good at thinking and sympathizing with millions of people. Our sympathy for the plight of strangers can be reduced to a number comparable to the number of people with whom we can be friends—a number with whom we unconsciously associate. [Sources: 0, 10]
We use the term “fading out of compassion” to mean 1) decrease in behavior and 2) influence as the number of people in need increases. Thus, “fading out of compassion,” as used here, means a decrease in positive affect, leading to a decrease in donation as the number of those in need increases. [Sources: 1]
The authors concluded that the largest donations to an individual victim were most likely due to the stronger emotional distress caused by those victims. The findings are consistent with both the psychophysical function of the lost frames and a possible decrease or extinction of compassion as the number of victims identified as risk groups increases. [Sources: 1, 5]
The number that causes the “collapse of compassion” may differ from person to person, but I think it may start to disintegrate along the correlated continuum of Dunbar 150. Think of the collapse of compassion on a grid where compassion is represented on the y-axis and the number of victims on the axis X. This lesson will explore why our compassion sometimes collapses under the weight of great suffering, and what we can do about it. support compassion and change the world for the better. [Sources: 2, 10]
— Slimane Zouggari
##### Sources #####
[0]: https://www.vox.com/explainers/2017/7/19/15925506/psychic-numbing-paul-slovic-apathy
[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4062481/
[2]: https://www.linkedin.com/learning/self-compassion-when-compassion-is-difficult/understanding-compassion-collapse
[3]: https://lithub.com/on-the-uses-of-compassion/
[4]: https://redefineschool.com/compassion-fade/
[5]: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0100115
[6]: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/06/opinion/the-arithmetic-of-compassion.html
[7]: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.586161/full
[8]: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/A-model-depicting-psychic-numbing-compassion-fade-when-valuing-the-saving-of-lives_fig9_263289454
[9]: http://econowmics.com/compassion-fade/
[10]: https://bigthink.com/the-present/why-compassion-fades/
[11]: https://podcast.wellevatr.com/why-compassion-fades
[12]: https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190464684.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780190464684-e-20