There are many explanations for the discrepancy between our response to Hokget and our response to genocide. Some argue that Americans care little about foreign lives—but then what should we make about their willingness to spend thousands of dollars to rescue a dog, a foreign dog on a stateless ship in international waters? Well, perhaps Americans care more about pets than people? But that does not stand up to scrutiny, either. Hokget’s rescue was remarkable, but there are countless stories about similar acts of compassion and generosity that people show toward their fellow human beings every day. No, there is something about genocide, about mass death in particular, that seems to trigger inaction.
I believe our inability to wrap our minds around large numbers is responsible for our apathy toward mass suffering. We are unconsciously biased in our moral judgment, in much the same way we are biased when we think about risk. Just as we are blasé about heart disease and lackadaisical about suicide, but terrified about psychopaths and terrorists, so also we make systematic errors in thinking about moral questions—especially those involving large numbers of people.
The philosopher Peter Singer once devised a dilemma that highlights a central contradiction in our moral reasoning. If you see a child drowning in a pond, and you know you can save the child without any risk to your own life—but you would ruin a fine pair of shoes worth two hundred dollars if you jumped into the water—would you save the child or save your shoes? Most people react incredulously to the question; obviously, a child’s life is worth more than a pair of shoes. If this is the case, Singer asked, why do large numbers of people hesitate to write a check for two hundred dollars to a reputable charity that could save the life of a child halfway around the world—when there are millions of such children who need our help? Even when people are absolutely certain their money will not be wasted and will be used to save a child’s life, fewer people are willing to write the check than to leap into the pond.
Our moral responsibilities feel different in these situations even though Singer is absolutely right in arguing they are equivalent challenges; one feels immediate and visceral, the other distant and abstract. We feel personally responsible for one child, whereas the other is one of millions who need help. Our responsibility feels diffused when it comes to children in distant places—there are many people who could write that check. But distance and diffusion of responsibility do not explain why we step forward in some cases—why did so many people come forward to save Hokget? Why did they write checks for a dog they would never meet? Why did they feel a single abandoned dog on a stateless ship was their problem?
I want to offer a disturbing idea. The reason human beings seem to care so little about mass suffering and death is precisely because the suffering is happening on a mass scale. The brain is simply not very good at grasping the implications of mass suffering. Americans would be far more likely to step forward if only a few people were suffering, or a single person were in pain. Hokget did not draw our sympathies because we care more about dogs than people; she drew our sympathies because she was a single dog lost on the biggest ocean in the world. If the hidden brain biases our perceptions about risk toward exotic threats, it shapes our compassion into a telescope. We are best able to respond when we are focused on a single victim.
We don’t feel twenty times sadder when we hear that twenty people have died in a disaster than when we hear that one person has died, even though the magnitude of the tragedy is twenty times larger. We feel outrage at a murderer who kills someone, but we don’t feel ten times the outrage if the murderer turns out to be a serial killer. We certainly don’t feel one hundred times the outrage if he turns out to be a mass-murdering psychopath who kills a hundred people. We do not viscerally feel that a Hitler, who is responsible for the deaths of millions, is millions of times worse than the murderer who kills one person. We can certainly reach such a conclusion abstractly, in our conscious minds, but we cannot feel it viscerally, because that is the domain of the hidden brain, and the hidden brain is simply not calibrated to deal with the difference between a single death and a million deaths.
But the paradox does not end there. Even if ten deaths do not make us feel ten times as sad as a single death, shouldn’t we feel five times as sad, or even at least twice as sad? There is disturbing evidence that shows that in many situations, not only do we not care twice as much about ten deaths as we do about one, but we may actually care less. I strongly suspect that if the Insiko had been carrying a hundred dogs, many people would have cared less about their fate than they did about Hokget. A hundred dogs do not have a single face, a single name, a single life story around which we can wrap our imaginations—and our compassion.
I found it ironic when Pamela Burns of the Hawaiian Humane Society told me that the thing she could not understand is how people spend fifty thousand dollars getting a kidney transplant for their cat when hundreds of healthy animals at shelters around the country are being euthanized. But when you consider the problem we have with large numbers, this makes sense. We spend our money to save one life and not ten lives or a hundred, because our internal telescope unconsciously biases us to care more about one life than a hundred.
The evidence for what I am going to call the telescope effect comes from a series of fascinating experiments. At the University of Oregon, the psychologist Paul Slovic asked volunteers shortly after the Rwandan genocide to imagine they were officials in charge of a humanitarian rescue effort. They could spend their money saving forty-five hundred lives at a refugee camp, but there were also many other pressing needs for the money. Without the volunteers being aware of it, Slovic divided them into two groups. Both groups were told their money could save forty-five hundred lives, but one group was told the refugee camp had eleven thousand people, whereas the other group was told the refugee camp had one hundred thousand people. Slovic found that people were much more reluctant to spend the money on the large camp than they were to spend the money on the small camp.
Intrigued, Slovic pressed further. He asked different groups of volunteers to imagine they were running a philanthropic foundation. Would they rather spend ten million dollars to save 10,000 lives from a disease that caused 15,000 deaths a year, or save 20,000 lives from a disease that killed 290,000 people a year? Overwhelmingly, volunteers preferred to spend money saving the ten thousand lives rather than the twenty thousand lives. Rather than tailor their investments to saving the largest number of lives, people sought to save the largest proportion of lives among the different groups of victims. An investment directed toward disease A could save two-thirds of the victims, whereas an investment directed at disease B could save “only” seven percent of the victims.
We respond to mass suffering in much the same way we respond to most things in our lives. We fall back on rules of thumb, on feelings, on intuitions. People who choose to spend money saving ten thousand lives rather than twenty thousand lives are not bad people. Rather, like those who spend thousands of dollars rescuing a single dog rather than directing the same amount of money to save a dozen dogs, they are merely allowing their hidden brain to guide them.
I have often wondered why the hidden brain displays a telescope effect when it comes to compassion. Evolutionary psychology tends to be an armchair sport, so please take my explanation for the paradox as one of several possible answers. The telescope effect may have arisen because evolution has built a powerful bias into us to preferentially love our kith and kin. It is absurd that we spend two hundred dollars on a birthday party for our son or our daughter when we could send the same money to a charity and save the life of a child halfway around the world. How can one child’s birthday party mean more to us than another child’s life? When we put it in those terms, we sound like terrible human beings. The paradox, as with the rescue of Hokget, is that our impulse springs from love, not callousness. Evolution has built a fierce loyalty toward our children into the deepest strands of our psyche. Without the unthinking telescope effect in the unconscious mind, parents w
ould not devote the immense time and effort it takes to raise children; generations of our ancestors would not have braved danger and cold, predators and hunger, to protect their young. The fact that you and I exist testifies to the utility of having a telescope in the brain that caused our ancestors to care intensely about the good of the few rather than the good of the many.
This telescope is activated when we hear a single cry for help—the child drowning in the pond, the puppy abandoned on an ocean. When we think of human suffering on a mass scale, our telescope does not work, because it has not been designed to work in such situations.
What makes evolutionary sense rarely makes moral sense. (One paradox of evolution is that ruthless natural selection has produced a species that recoils at the ruthlessness of natural selection.) Humans are the first and only species that is even aware of large-scale suffering taking place in distant lands; the moral telescope in our brain has not had a chance to evolve and catch up with our technological advances. When we are told about a faraway genocide, we can apply only our conscious mind to the challenge. We can reason, but we cannot feel the visceral compassion that is automatically triggered by the child who is drowning right before us. Our conscious minds can tell us that it is absurd to spend a boatload of money to save one life when the same money could be used to save ten—just as it can tell us it is absurd to be more worried about homicide than suicide. But in moral decision-making, as in many other domains of life where we are unaware of how unconscious biases influence us, it is the hidden brain that usually carries the day.
Slovic once told volunteers about a seven-year-old girl in Mali who was starving and in desperate need of help. Volunteers in the experiment were given a certain amount of money and asked how much they were willing to spend to help the little girl. On average, people gave half their money to help the girl. Slovic then asked another group of volunteers the same question, except instead of the little girl, the volunteers were told about the problem of famine in Africa, and that there were millions of people in dire need of help. The volunteers gave half as much money as the volunteers in the first group. In another study in Israel, Slovic and his colleagues found that people were willing to donate more money to help save the life of a single child with cancer than they were to help eight children with cancer.
Slovic took the experiment that showcased the little girl in Africa a step further. He told another group of volunteers about a little boy in Mali. One group of volunteers was asked whether they would give money to the little girl; another was asked whether they would donate money to the little boy. A third group of volunteers was told about both the boy and the girl and asked how much they were willing to give. People gave the same amount of money when told about either the boy or the girl. But when the children were presented together, the volunteers gave less.
Journalists sometimes talk about compassion fatigue, the inability of people to respond to suffering when the scale or length of the suffering exceeds some astronomical number. But Slovic’s work suggests that compassion fatigue starts when the number of victims in need of help rises from one to two.
“The feelings of sadness dropped,” Slovic said about the volunteers who were told about the two children in need of help. He added, “You can’t lock on to two people in need of help as closely as you can lock on to one person. You can’t make an emotional connection as strongly to two as to one. If empathy is putting yourself in someone else’s shoes, think of putting yourself in two people’s shoes. It does not work. It falls apart.”
When we rely on the hidden brain to guide our moral decision-making, we spend millions on dramatic rescues of a few lives, and spend next to nothing on saving the lives of millions. There is no use complaining about the hidden brain, or wishing it away. The telescope effect in our moral judgment is part of our nature. There is nothing we can do about it. But there is something we can do about our actions. We can choose to allow our actions to be guided by reason rather than instinct, choose to set up national and international institutions that respond instantly to humanitarian crises, rather than wait for our heartstrings to be pulled by stories of individual tragedy. If we rely on our moral telescopes, there will be people in a hundred years who ask how the world could have sat on its hands through so many genocides in the twenty-first century.
Making the unconscious conscious is difficult because the central obstacle lies within ourselves. But putting reason ahead of instinct and intuition is also what sets us apart from every other species that has ever lived. Understanding the hidden brain and building safeguards to protect us against its vagaries can help us be more successful in our everyday lives. It can aid us in our battle against threats and help us spend our money more wisely. But it can also do something more important than any of those things: It can make us better people.
For all the ways this book has shown how the rational mind is unequal to the machinations of the hidden brain, this is also a book that argues that reason is our only bulwark against bias. Our hidden brain will always make some criminals seem more dangerous, and some presidential candidates seem less trustworthy, because of the color of their skin. Terrorism, psychopaths, and homicide will always seem scarier to us than obesity, smoking, and suicide. The heartbreaking story about the single puppy lost at sea will make us cry more quickly than a dry account of a million children killed by malaria. In every one of these cases, reason is our only rock against the tides of unconscious bias. It is our lighthouse and our life jacket. It is—or should be—our voice of conscience.
Acknowledgments
This book is filled with ideas that are not my own: I have drawn on the work and insights of hundreds of researchers, research studies, books, and reports. Scientists across the United States and the world have my grateful thanks for the experimental data and research that form the backbone of this book. In many cases I have taken scientific ideas and applied them to everyday problems that cannot be studied in laboratories. Dozens of people have helped me do this by sharing personal stories of triumph and tragedy. I am very grateful to them.
It is impossible to mention every researcher and source who informed my reporting, but I would like to note my immense debt to Mahzarin Banaji, the Harvard University psychologist who first inspired me to study the effects of unconscious bias in everyday life. Among many others I am very grateful to Brian Nosek and Anthony Greenwald; Frances Aboud and John Bargh; Abraham Tesser, John Trojanowski, and Virginia Lee; Ben Barres and Joan Roughgarden; Brian and Wendy NcNamara and Evelyn Sommers; Tiffany Alexander, Will DeRiso, and Benigno Aguirre; Jennifer Eberhardt, Robert Dunham, and Ernest Porter; Rosann Barker, John Powell, Drew Westen, Jerry Kang, Camille Charles, Todd Rogers, and Celinda Lake; Ariel Merari, Masami Takahashi, Scott Atran, Rebecca Moore, Fielding McGehee, Vernon Gosney, and Deborah and Larry Layton; Michele Shinnick, Arthur Kellermann, Matthew Miller, John Violanti, Pamela Burns, and Paul Slovic. There are many people who contributed to my reporting who are not mentioned in the pages of this book. They include Eric Ferrero, Nick Brustin, Debi Cornwall, and Sam Millsap; Baba Shiv and Debu Purohit; Kelly Connelly and the Baycrest Center for Geriatric Care; Eric Finzi and Elizabeth Sheldon; Kevin Simowski, Andrew Cullen, and John Duffy; Scott Plous, Ludovic Blain, Ismail White, and Marty Marks; Sandra Castro and Billy Nolas, Pam Willenz, Cherie Castellano, and the California Historical Society. Special thanks go to Scott Fappiano, John D. Cerqueira, and the great guitarist Les Paul.
My agent Laurie Liss of Sterling Lord Literistic spurred me to write the book proposal that led to The Hidden Brain, and guided me through countless revisions. This book would not exist without her. Throughout the reporting and writing of this book, Laurie offered me hours of counsel—literary and personal—for which I am deeply grateful.
I am honored to have had Chris Jackson of Spiegel & Grau edit this book. Every conversation I had with Chris replenished my reserves of curiosity and energy, those twin engines that propel all writers. I am indebted to him—and to Julie Grau and Cindy Spiege
l—for their deep commitment to this book and its ideas.
Many colleagues taught me how to be a good reporter—and gave me breaks when I needed them. I am so grateful to Arlene Morgan and Donald Drake for years of mentoring and friendship, and to Leonard Downie Jr., Phil Bennett, Dorothy Brown, Mark Bowden, Ted Glasser, Marion Lewenstein, Dale Maharidge, Judy Serrin, Reggie Stuart, and Julia Vitullo-Martin. A Neiman Fellowship at Harvard University and a fellowship at the Peter Jennings Project for Journalists and the Constitution helped this book in crucial ways. My warm thanks to Bob Giles, Jane Eisner, and Kayce Freed Jennings. Many journalism organizations provided me with comrades and recognition—among them, I am very grateful to the Asian American Journalist Association and the South Asian Journalists Association.
The Washington Post makes an appearance on the very first line of the book; its influence runs to the very last. Donald Graham, Katharine Weymouth, and the extended Graham family have built an institution of tremendous depth and integrity, and editors Marcus Brauchli, Liz Spayd, and Raju Narisetti have continued a proud tradition of excellence. Many editors at the Post have guided me over the years. Among them, I am especially grateful to Steve Coll, Susan Glasser, Steve Holmes, Nils Bruzelius, Maralee Schwartz, Tom Shroder, Kevin Merida, and Peter Perl. I am particularly grateful to Rob Stein and Sydney Trent, for seeing abilities in me that I did not know I possessed.
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