Compassion fade and the challenge of environmental conservation
Journal Title: Judgment and Decision Making - Year 2013, Vol 8, Issue 4
Abstract
Compassion shown towards victims often decreases as the number of individuals in need of aid increases, identifiability of the victims decreases, and the proportion of victims helped shrinks. Such “compassion fade” may hamper individual-level and collective responses to pressing large-scale crises. To date, research on compassion fade has focused on humanitarian challenges; thus, it remains unknown whether and to what extent compassion fade emerges when victims are non-human others. Here we show that compassion fade occurs in the environmental domain, but only among non-environmentalists. These findings suggest that compassion fade may challenge our collective ability and willingness to confront the major environmental problems we face, including climate change. The observed moderation effect of environmental identity further indicates that compassion fade may present a significant psychological barrier to building broad public support for addressing these problems. Our results highlight the importance of bringing findings from the field of judgment and decision making to bear on pressing societal issues.
Authors and Affiliations
Ezra M. Markowitz, Paul Slovic, Daniel Västfjäll and Sara D. Hodges
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP678069
- DOI -
- Views 150
- Downloads 0
Trolley problems in context
Would you redirect a trolley to save five people even if it means that the trolley will run over a person on the side track? Most people say they would. Would you push that same person into the path of the trolley in ord...
Investigating an alternate form of the cognitive reflection test
Much research in cognitive psychology has focused on the tendency to conserve limited cognitive resources. The CRT is the predominant measure of such miserly information processing, and also predicts a number of frequent...
How much compensation is too much? An investigation of the effectiveness of financial overcompensation as a means to enhance customer loyalty
The present paper examines the effectiveness of financial overcompensation as a means to enhance customer loyalty after a product failure. Overcompensation implies that customers are entitled to a refund that is larger t...
The psychology of moral reasoning
This article presents a theory of reasoning about moral propositions that is based on four fundamental principles. First, no simple criterion picks out propositions about morality from within the larger set of deontic pr...
Is broad bracketing always better? How broad decision framing leads to more optimal preferences over repeated gambles
The effect of choice bracketing — the consideration of repeated decisions as a set versus in isolation — has important implications for products that are inherently time-sensitive and entail varying levels of risk, inclu...