The Affective Influence of Risk Perception and the Collapse of Compassion
Recently, our collective attention was jarred and drawn to a small three year old Syrian child whose body was washed up on the Turkish shore after the boat he and his family were in was abandoned by smugglers and then subsequently experienced rough water. The three year old was Aylan Kurdi. Little Aylan and his family were fleeing war torn Syria. His father, Abdullah Kurdi, was the lone survivor, while his wife and two sons drowned in the sea. Abdullah was trying to give his sons a better life in Europe. But instead, he returned home Friday to a war zone to bury his family, days after their bodies washed up on a beach in Bodrum, Turkey.
The stark reality of the refugee crisis, captured in a single harrowing image of a toddler lying dead, washed up on a beach, has prompted a global outpouring of grief. The image sent shockwaves across the world. Although many refugees have suffered the same fate, this picture alone managed to spark something in the collective consciousness and attention of the world in a way no story about the refugees had previously done. The photographer, who took the heart-breaking picture of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi’s lifeless body, on the shore of the Aegean coast, has said she was “petrified” as she took the shot. Photo-journalist Nilüfer Demir, who was in Bodrum covering the refugee crisis for Turkey’s Doğan News Agency (DHA), said in the moment she took the photo, she put her emotions aside to carry out her duty as a journalist. Why is it that it took this lone photo to bring our rapt attention to the Syrian crisis? Social psychologists tell us it is due our uniquely human way we take in and process information, often called risk perception.
Feelings over Intellect
We humans are not exactly rational in how we think about risk as Frans Johansson points out in his text, The Medici Effect. Emotions, and fear in particular, play a big part in our perception of possible loss versus potential gain.
My blog entry relies heavily on Paul Slovic’s article, The More Who Die the Less We Care: Confronting Apathy Toward Mass Atrocities. His groundbreaking work on risk perception has profound implications for emergency management, homeland security, humanitarian response, policy development, social work, risk management and law enforcement. Slovic describes how people fail to act when confronted with complex issues such as mass murder and genocide because of affect bias and a focus on individuals rather than large groups. Affect bias is the first filter, often called a thinking heuristic, or rule of thumb thinking, that people use to process information quickly. The affect bias is an emotional response that allows for quick decision making without the benefit of extensive research and critical thinking. This default thinking has its roots in our evolutionary DNA. Early man had to quickly sum up friend or foe as he or she saw another human walking in the distance and determine whether the other human was or was not part of the tribe. As our brains have evolved over time, the limbic system still processes emotions and perceptions very quickly and it is still our default mechanism to take in threat information. Slovic makes this point clear, “Thoughtful deliberation takes effort. Fortunately evolution has equipped us with sophisticated cognitive and perceptual mechanisms that can guide us through our daily lives efficiently, with minimal need for deep thinking.” Long before we had invented probability theory, risk assessment and decision analysis, there was intuition, instinct and gut feeling, honed by experience, to tell us whether an animal was safe to approach or the water was safe to drink. Slovic states, “The human risk perception system is based more on emotion and instincts than on reason and rationality, and that bodes poorly for dealing with the immensely complex threats.” Slovic’s ultimate argument is that there needs to be deliberative, humanitarian critical thinking and action to confront some of the world’s biggest atrocities and problems.
Connecting to the Pain of Others
More people than at any other time in history have been forced to flee their homes and seek refuge elsewhere due to wars, conflict, poverty, violence and persecution, according to the UN Refugee Agency. The number of people forcibly displaced at the end of 2014 reached 59.5 million compared to 37.5 million a decade ago, abetted by the eruption or reigniting of conflicts in Africa, the Middle East, Europe and Asia.
In the case of little Aylan, our collective attention and horror have been laser focused the powerful image of a small child washed up on a Turkish beach. There are a number of dynamics that are occurring with our processing of the Syrian crisis and other large scale problems facing humanity. The key to capturing the world’s attention to complex problems is about connection and connecting. Let’s unpack this. Susan Sontag, said in Regarding the Pain of Others, that “the affluent share a single work with the poorest, just as the violent share a world with victims of violence and the healthy share a world with the sick. Being a spectator of calamities taking place in another county, is a quintessential modern experience. But the notion that we belong to different worlds — the first and third, for example — is an illusion.” Despite the vast separation of oceans, culture, religion and language — we are all connected.
And in 1998, Wyslawa Szymborska said, “nothing has changed. The body still trembles as it trembled before Rome was founded and after, in the twentieth century before and after Christ. Tortures are just what they were, only the earth has shrunk and whatever goes on sounds as if it is just a room away.” The recycling of threat and trauma plays over and over across the ages, however now we have the ability to connect.
We are living in a very interesting time when people are able to connect in ways we’ve have never experienced before. In the time of technological advances people have the ability to witness, sometimes in real time, the suffering of others. With that comes the responsibility to respond to it, yet we do not do so. Why? It turns out that it may be about the mind’s inability to comprehend the large numbers of people suffering.
Mother Teresa once said, “If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.” And this is the crux of the dilemma that throughout time, has been played out over and over again.
This quote captures a powerful but unsettling aspect of human nature. Why does this happen? Why do good people ignore the mass suffering, mass murder and genocide of others?
Peter Singer in his 2009 book “The Life You Save,” uses an analogy of the story of seeing a child drowning in a pond and the behavior of others to jump in and save the child. He says, “ordinary people will put forth great effort to help an individual in distress.” Throughout time, we have seen this kind of scenario played out and not just with people, but with the rescuing of animals too. Singer goes on to say, “if we are willing to go to great efforts to save the drowning child shouldn’t we also give money to trusted humanitarian aid groups that can save many children’s lives as far less cost to us than rescuing the child in the pond?” It’s timeless perplexing dilemma that has profound human and social roots.
Raphael Lemkin, a polish Jew and lone survivor, who lost 40 members of his family in WWII during the holocaust created the word “genocide” as an attempt to put a word to the atrocities of Nazi Germany. The word “genocide” is rooted in ‘genos’ for family, tribe, or race and ‘cide’ the Latin word for killing. In 1948 he drafted the UN’s Genocide Convention to ensure that genocide would never take place again but in 2008, the 60th anniversary of the drafting of the UN Genocide Convention was deemed an abject failure.
Samantha Power, 2003 wrote the Pulitzer prize winning book, “The Problem from Hell, America in the Age of Genocide,” which describes the failure of the American government to respond to the mass murders and genocides over the last century, such as Darfur, Cambodia( 1975–1979), Bangladesh (1971) Nazi Germany Holocaust, and Zimbabwe (2000), just to name a few. There has never been an adequate response to any of the genocide and political mass murders in the last century. In 1994, in Rwanda, 800,000 people were murdered in 100 days, (8,000 per day) while the world watched and did nothing. Although President Bush was quite unresponsive to the murder of hundreds of thousands of people in Darfur, it was Clinton who ignored Rwanda, and Roosevelt who did little to stop the Holocaust. And, now we see thousands of Syrians feeling similar historical oppression, yet the U.S. has done very little to help. Behind every president who ignored mass murder were millions of citizens whose indifference allowed them to get away with it. Elie Wiesel, a holocaust survivor said, “indifference is always the friend of the enemy, for it benefits the aggressor, never the victim.” Yet, the world is indifferent to genocide and to those escaping war, poverty, genocide that we see in Syria and that has happened over time in other parts of the world in times past.
Samantha Power in her book says that “genocide in distant lands has not captivated senators, congressional caucuses, lobbyists or individual citizens. The battle to stop genocide has been repeatedly lost in the realm of domestic politics. No U.S. president has ever made genocide prevention a priority, and no U.S. president has ever suffered politically for his indifference to its occurrence. It is no coincidence that genocide rages on.”
Could this callousness be explained in part by a lack of an emotional connection to mass murder and its victims? Genocide is real but we do not feel the savagery in our everyday experience. Powers said, “we cannot wrap our heads around it and retreat to the twilight of knowing and not knowing.” Nicholas D. Kristoff in the New York times reported that during Darfur, in 2004, NBC gave only five minutes of coverage all year and CBS only three minutes to the atrocities. That is one minute of coverage for every hundred thousand deaths. In contrast, Martha Stewart received 130 minutes of coverage by the three networks. And in 2015 Kristof says, “the horrific images of Syrian refugees struggling toward safety — or in the case of Aylan Kurdi, 3, drowning on that journey — I think of other refugees. Albert Einstein. Madeleine Albright. The Dalai Lama. According to the 2013 Presidential Medal of Freedom Recipient and Nobel Prize winner, Daniel Kahneman, “People tend to assess the relative importance of issues by the ease with which they are retrieved from memory — and this is largely determined by the extent of coverage in the media. Frequently mentioned topics populate the mind even as others slip away from awareness. In turn, what the media choose to report corresponds to their view of what is currently on the public’s mind. It is no accident that authoritarian regimes exert substantial pressure on independent media. Because public interest is most easily aroused by dramatic events and by celebrities, media feeding frenzies are common.”
The Psychology of Risk Perception
Risk management in the modern world relies upon two forms of thinking. Risk as feelings refers to our instinctive and intuitive reactions to danger. Risk as analysis brings logic, reason, quantification and deliberation to bear on risk, hazard management and complex problems. In, The Feeling of Risk: New Perspectives on Risk Perception, Slovic goes on to say that there are two drivers of risk perception behind the affective thinking: a sense of powerlessness in the face of involuntary and catastrophic impacts, which he called dread risk, and an anxiety that comes from the uncertainty of new and unforeseeable dangers, which he called unknown risk. Dread risk is reinforced by being intergenerational and irreversible. Unknown risk is emphasized by being invisible and unprecedented. The feelings come first when presented with difficult moral problems and there is a paradox that rational models of decision making fail to represent. On the one hand, we respond strongly to aid a single individual in need. On the other hand, we often fail to prevent mass tragedies such as genocide or take appropriate measures to reduce potential losses from natural disasters. This might seem irrational but is due in part to an interesting dynamic: as the numbers get larger and larger, we become insensitive; the numbers fail to trigger the emotion or feeling necessary to motivate action.
Numbers and numbness: Images and Feeling
The behavioral theories and data confirm what keen observers of human behavior have long known. According to Slovic and Slovic in 2004, “numerical representations of human lives do not necessarily convey the importance of those lives. All too often the numbers represent dry statistics, “human beings with the tears dried off,” that lack feeling and fail to motivate action.” How can we impart the feelings that are needed for rational action? There have been a variety of attempts to do this that may be instructive. Most of these involve highlighting the images that lie beneath the numbers. As nature writer and conservationist Rick Bass (1996) observes in his plea to conserve the Yaak Valley in Montana, “the numbers are important, and yet they are not everything. For whatever reasons, images often strike us more powerfully, more deeply than numbers. We seem unable to hold the emotions aroused by numbers for nearly as long as those of images. We quickly grow numb to the facts and the math.”
Images seem to be the key to conveying affect and meaning, though some imagery is more powerful than others. Other images may be more effective. Organizers of a rally designed to get Congress to do something about 38,000 deaths a year from handguns piled 38,000 pairs of shoes in a mound in front of the Capitol (Associated Press, 1994). Students at a middle school in Tennessee, struggling to comprehend the magnitude of the holocaust, collected 6 million paper clips as a centerpiece for a memorial. Probably the most important image to represent a human life is that of a single human face. Journalist Paul Neville writes about the need to probe beneath the statistics of joblessness, homelessness, mental illness, and poverty in his home state of Oregon, in order to discover the people behind the numbers — who they are, what they look like, how they sound, what they feel, what hopes and fears they harbor. He concludes: “I don’t know when we became a nation of statistics. But I know that the path to becoming a nation — and a community — of people, is remembering the faces behind the numbers” In a similar comment, Albert Szent Gyorgi says, “I am deeply moved if I see one man suffering and would risk my life for him. Then I talk impersonally about the possible pulverization of our big cities, with a hundred million dead. I am unable to multiply one man’s suffering by a hundred million.” Just like our visual perception, our moral perceptions may be sophisticated and accurate but are often subject to being very biased and in the case of genocide, they totally fail us.
We Think in Two Systems: Fast and Slow
In psychology, several social scientists have explored dual processing theories which means basically that people understand reality in two fundamentally different ways. Daniel Kahneman’s findings are consistent with Paul Slovic’s findings, regarding two distinct processing systems. In the international bestseller, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman, the renowned psychologist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, explains the two systems that drive the way we think. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. These insights are highly related to risk perception because we have a subjective emotional judgment of the severity of risk and it is very prone to bias, especially affect bias. Our human reliance on feelings tends to be a quicker, easier and more efficient way to navigate in a complex, uncertain and dangerous world, however, our affect bias (System 1) sometimes misleads us. In such circumstances we need to ensure that reason and analysis also are employed. Despite the rationality of risk as feelings, which employs imagery and affect in remarkably accurate and efficient ways, this way of responding to complex risk has a darker, non-rational side. Affect may misguide us in important and dangerous ways.
Psychophysical Numbing
Our over-reliance on feelings to process information and the value of life saving is tricky. As Slovic’s experiments and charts reveal, as the number of lives lost grows large, the value of life is diminished. This essentially is what psychologists call, “psychophysical numbing.” Our capacity to feel either good or bad is limited and the lack of feeling leads to inaction when very large losses of life occur. This leads to not only psychic numbing but to the collapse of compassion. We start caring but as the numbers increase we lose capacity for compassion. Human life loses its value under the backdrop of a larger tragedy. In the compassion collapse model, the numbers represent “dry statistics.” This is the tricky part — you have to be able to FEEL for people to be motivated to help them.
Affect, analysis, and the value of human lives
How should we value the saving of human lives? If we believe that every human life is of equal value (a view likely endorsed by System 2 thinking), the value of saving N lives is N times the value of saving one life, as represented by the linear function in Figure 1. An argument can also be made for a model in which large losses of life are disproportionately more serious because they threaten the social fabric and viability of a community as depicted in Figure 2.
Our cognitive and perceptual systems seem to be designed to sensitize us to small changes in our environment, possibly at the expense of making us less able to detect and respond to large changes. As the psychophysical research indicates, constant increases in the magnitude of a stimulus typically evoke smaller and smaller changes in response. Applying this principle to the valuing of human life suggests that a form of psychophysical numbing may result from our inability to appreciate losses of life as they become larger (see Figure 3).
The Collapse of Compassion and Compassion Fatigue
When the statistics of disaster after disaster climbs so high the affective System 1 cannot process it and psychophysical numbing takes root, the necessary elements of the collapse of compassion are put in place. In addition, when people are confronted with disaster on a daily basis and the numbers are so great, compassion fatigue sets in. Compassion fatigue, sometimes referred to a secondary trauma stress is a gradual lessening of compassion over time. It happens in environments where the cumulative effects of physical, emotional and psychological trauma occurs frequently. It is common in environments where there is high and intense stress. Medical professionals, first responders, psychotherapists, aid workers, soldiers and law enforcement, just to name a few, are prone to compassion fatigue. But, in our current media and polarized political climate ordinary citizens who have seen and heard a constant stream of fear inducing images and stories of calamity, war and horror can be susceptible to secondary trauma symptoms and compassion fatigue. This leads me to discuss some of the experiments and findings of the social science literature that can direct efforts of limited compassion to where it is needed.
Studies by social psychologists find that when the focus is on a single individual rather than a group of people, more attention is focused on the individual because of the emotional connection is easier to make. The focus of attention to one person allows people to feel more compassion than even a pair of people.
An experiment was done by social psychologists Small, Lowenstein and Slovic in 2007 that gave people the opportunity to give $5 to Save the Children. The study consisted of three separate conditions:
(1) identifiable victim, (two little girls with photos, Rokia and Moussa)
(2) statistical victims, (statistics only in word form), and
(3) identifiable victim with statistical information.
The information provided for the statistical conditions was:
Statistical Lives Condition (2)
· Food shortages in Malawi are affecting more than 3 million children.
· In Zambia, severe rainfall deficits have resulted in a 42% drop in maize
production from 2000. As a result, an estimated 3 million Zambians face
hunger.
· Four million Angolans — one third of the population — have been forced to
flee their homes.
· More than 11 million people in Ethiopia need immediate food assistance.
In one condition, respondents were asked to donate $5 to feed an identified victim, a seven-year-old African girl named Rokia of whom they were showed a picture. They contributed more than twice the amount given by a second group, asked to donate to the same organization working to save millions of Africans (statistical lives) from hunger. A third group was asked to donate to Rokia, but was also shown the larger statistical problem (millions in need) shown to the second group. Unfortunately, coupling the large-scale statistical realities with Rokia’s story significantly reduced the contributions to Rokia.
The average donations are presented in Figure 8. Donations in response to the identified individual, Rokia, were far greater than donations in response to the statistical portrayal of the food crisis. Most important, however, and most discouraging, was the fact that coupling the statistical realities with Rokia’s story significantly reduced the contributions to Rokia. Alternatively, one could say that using Rokia’s story to “put a face behind the statistical problem” did not do much to increase donations (the difference between the mean donations of $1.43 and $1.14 was not statistically reliable). Small et al. also measured feelings of sympathy toward the cause (Rokia or the statistical victims). These feelings were most strongly correlated with donations when people faced an identifiable victim. A follow-up experiment by Small et al. provided additional evidence for the importance of feelings. Before being given an opportunity to donate study participants were either primed to feel (“Describe your feelings when you hear the word `baby,”’ and similar items) or to answer five questions such as “If an object travels at five feet per minute, then by your calculations how many feet will it travel in 360 seconds?” Priming analytic thinking (calculation) reduced donations to the identifiable victim (Rokia) relative to the feeling-based thinking prime. Yet the two primes had no distinct effect on statistical victims, which is symptomatic of the difficulty in generating feelings for such victims.
Compassion Collapse occurs as a byproduct of the limited capacity of humans to feel for extended periods of time. Compassion for others has been characterized by social psychologist Daniel Batson as ‘a fragile flower, easily crushed by self concern.’ Faced with genocide and other mass tragedies, we cannot rely on our feelings alone to guide us to act properly.
Putting the Tears Back On Statistical Lives
We can communicate with images and personalized stories and faces. This is why Aylan’s tragic loss hits us in such a profound way. The image of this three year old boy washed up on a beach is a jarring image and the families’ subsequent story personalizes the Syrian refugee experience. This is part of the psychophysical puzzle. However, there are ways to personalize the large numbers so they become more real. An elementary school in Tennessee was studying the holocaust and so they wanted to understand the number 6 million. So they collected 6 million paperclips to wrap their minds around how big that number is. After they collected 6 million paperclips, they made a holocaust museum. Studies by social psychologists find that a single individual, unlike a group, is viewed as a psychologically coherent unit. This leads to more extensive processing of information and stronger impressions about individuals than about groups. Consistent with this, a study in Israel by Kogut and Ritov in 2005 found that people tend to feel more distress and compassion and provide more aid when considering a single victim than when considering a group of eight victims. A follow-up study in Sweden by Vastfjall in 2009, found that people felt less compassion and donated less aid toward a pair of victims than to either individual alone. The insensitivity to life saving portrayed by the psychophysical model is unsettling. But the studies just described suggest an even more disturbing psychological tendency. Our capacity to feel is limited. To the extent that valuation of life saving depends on feelings driven by attention or imagery, it might follow the function shown in the figure above, where the emotion or affective feeling is greatest at N = 1 but begins to decline at N = 2 and collapses at some higher value of N that becomes simply ‘a statistic.’ It was Robert J. Lifton in 1967 that coined the term ‘psychic numbing’ to describe the ‘turning off’ of feeling that enabled rescue workers to function during the horrific aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing, The experiments depict a form of psychic numbing that is not beneficial. Rather, it leads to apathy and inaction, consistent with what is seen repeatedly in response to mass murder and genocide.
Framing and the Language of Suffering
Framing is a potent, yet inescapable, influence on the interpretation of reported events. In its simplest form, framing refers to the central organizing story. The frame simplifies the report and cues the audience to the report’s ‘‘place’’ in a familiar, shared social construction of everyday reality. Tacitly, the frame signals another instance of a familiar theme (e.g., another report of wasteful government spending, another example of political corruption, another instance of gang violence). Sometimes a single image establishes the frame. For instance, the images of Muhammed Dura, a Palestinian boy supposedly killed in his father’s arms, ‘‘clinches the ‘larger narrative’’’ linking the event to ‘‘a chain of iconic images which (rightly or wrongly) signify historical events in public memory’’ But, it is not just images that are powerful framing tools, words too need to be carefully crafted. Words matter.
Syrian Crisis: Migrant or Refugee?
The term “migrant” is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “one who moves, either temporarily or permanently, from one place, area or country of residence to another.” Lydia Smith points out that language is a powerful framing instrument. There are various reasons for migration, such as those who move to work or seek a better life — generally termed “economic migrants” — and people who move for family reasons or to study. People also migrate to flee conflict or persecution, which is where the definition converges with the term “refugee”. Although the word migrant used to be neutral, some believe the term is now a pejorative used to spread negative connotations of migration and enforce prejudices. In August, Al Jazeera said it would no longer use the word migrant to refer to people trying to cross the Mediterranean. “The word migrant has become a largely inaccurate umbrella term for this complex story,” online editor Barry Malone points out. According to the UN, the majority of people drowning to reach European shores are escaping war, persecution, famine and poverty. The U.N. Convention describes a refugee as: “A person who owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unstable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it.” In the current refugee crisis in Syria, the words “migrant” and “refugee” are often used in the same news report. But, let’s be clear, these individuals we see fleeing are refugees.
Rather than simply disseminating more and more information about disasters, experts should be attentive to and sensitive about the public’s broad conception of risk. Risk management is a two-way street. The public should listen to expert’s assessment of risk and experts need to also under the cultural and emotional factors of the public’s understanding of risk.
Slovic in 2009, proposed that international and domestic law should require officials to publicly deliberate and proffer reasons to justify action or inaction in response to genocide. If enforced, a requirement for public justification would probably heighten pressure to act to save lives rather than allowing people to die. The stakes are high. Failure to understand how our minds become insensitive to catastrophic losses of human life and failure to act on this knowledge may condemn us to passively witness another century of genocide and mass abuses of innocent people as in the previous century. It may also increase the likelihood that we may fail to take appropriate action to reduce the damages from other catastrophic events.
What Can Be Done?
Here are some recommendations for what can be done to eliminate bias and combat psychophysical numbing.
The Powerful Need for Images, Art and Storytelling as Tools: Use images that puts a face, name and story with a crisis. Tell the story through art, photography, words, music, dance or any other form of expression that puts the human element back into the crisis. Utilize names over numbers and put faces to the facts. In an essay called ‘The blood root of art,’ published in his 1996 volume The Book of Yaak, Montana author Rick Bass gets right to the heart of the discussion, stating: “The numbers are important, and yet they are not everything. For whatever reasons, images often strike us more powerfully, more deeply than numbers. We seem unable to hold the emotions aroused by numbers for nearly as long as those of images. We quickly grow numb to the facts and the math.”
Be Aware of the Default Affective Bias: Awareness of bias is the first step in not allowing it to contaminate risk perception and decision-making. Understand intellectually the process of the default bias and make a conscious effort to use System 2 critical and lateral thinking to predict, prevent, mitigate and recover from atrocities. A key element in preventing future catastrophes is to better understand the social forces that produce them, and then to take action to address those forces and strengthen our capacity for resilience in the face of future threats. In the text, the Psychology of Terrorism, Bongar, et, al, states, “Because negativity biases and the emotional basis of risk perception are fundamental aspects of the psychology we all share, perceptions of threat can easily ripple through society. The propensity for social amplification further bolsters terrorist threats.” The notion of risk is inextricably linked in many people’s minds with danger, but for those who study risk professionally, danger is only one side of the risk coin, the other being opportunity. In other words, there are upside risks as well downside risks, and the ability to estimate the likelihood of some future possibility applies equally to possibilities that are dangerous and those that are not. Risk intelligence is not, therefore, confined to assessing danger; it should be considered a much more general kind of cognitive skill.
Create Symbolic Moments: Some examples of creating symbolic moments are for example, in 1994 organizers of a rally designed to get Congress to do something about 38,000 deaths a year from handguns piled 38,000 pairs of shoes in a mound in front of the Capitol. Students at a middle school in Tennessee, struggling to comprehend the magnitude of the holocaust, collected 6 million paper clips as a centerpiece for a memorial.
Use Framing to Describe Issues: For many of the world’s most complex challenges, people often try to interpret them through their own frames to make sense of it all. Understand this dynamic and use framing via words and images in the media to accurately frame the issues so that people can understand it.
Use System 2 Thinking: Slovic’s ultimate argument is that there needs to be deliberative, humanitarian critical thinking and action to confront some of the world’s biggest atrocities and problems. In the case of genocides and other mass crimes against humanity, we must focus now on engaging this mechanism by strengthening international legal and political structures that pre-commit states to respond to these tragedies rather than being silent witnesses after the fact. The United Nations is the institution that was created in part to deal with such issues, but structural problems built into its very charter have made it ineffective. Appreciation of the failures of moral intuition makes development of new institutional arrangements even more urgent and critical. For it may only be laws and institutions that can keep us on course, forcing us to doggedly pursue the hard measures needed to combat genocide when our attention strays and our feelings lull us into complacency. Slovic proposes that international and domestic law should require officials to publicly deliberate and proffer reasons to justify action or inaction in response to genocide. If enforced, a requirement for public justification would probably heighten pressure to act to save lives rather than allowing people to die.
Angi English is currently the Chief of Staff at the New Mexico Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management and a HSx Founding Scholar for Innovation at the Center for Homeland Defense and Security (HSx 1701). She has a Master’s in Security Studies from the Naval Postgraduate School’s Center for Homeland Defense and Security (MS 1303/1304)and a Master’s in Educational Psychology from Baylor University. She’s also a graduate of the Executive Leader’s Program at the Naval Postgraduate School (ELP 1201). She is a Certified Part 107 Unmanned Aerial Systems pilot and serves as an Advisory Member of the DRONEREPONDERS and a Brand Ambassador for Women Who Drone, a Licensed Professional Counselor and a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
