Västfjäll Daniel, Slovic Paul, Mayorga Marcus, Peters Ellen
Decision Research, Eugene, Oregon, United States of America; Linköping University, Department of Behavioral Sciences and Learning, Linköping, Sweden.
Decision Research, Eugene, Oregon, United States of America; University of Oregon, Department of Psychology, Eugene, Oregon, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2014 Jun 18;9(6):e100115. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0100115. eCollection 2014.
Charitable giving in 2013 exceeded $300 billion, but why do we respond to some life-saving causes while ignoring others? In our first two studies, we demonstrated that valuation of lives is associated with affective feelings (self-reported and psychophysiological) and that a decline in compassion may begin with the second endangered life. In Study 3, this fading of compassion was reversed by describing multiple lives in a more unitary fashion. Study 4 extended our findings to loss-frame scenarios. Our capacity to feel sympathy for people in need appears limited, and this form of compassion fatigue can lead to apathy and inaction, consistent with what is seen repeatedly in response to many large-scale human and environmental catastrophes.
2013年的慈善捐赠超过了3000亿美元，但为什么我们会对一些拯救生命的事业做出回应，而忽略另一些呢？在我们的前两项研究中，我们证明了对生命的估值与情感感受（自我报告和心理生理方面）相关，并且同情心的下降可能从第二个濒危生命开始。在研究3中，通过以更统一的方式描述多个生命，这种同情心的消退得到了扭转。研究4将我们的发现扩展到了损失框架情景。我们对有需要的人产生同情的能力似乎是有限的，这种形式的同情疲劳会导致冷漠和不作为，这与我们在应对许多大规模人类和环境灾难时反复看到的情况一致。
