Slovic, Paul2018-06-222018-06-222018-06-09Slovic, P. (2018, June 9). The more who die, the less we care: Confronting genocide and the numbing arithmetic of compassion. Speech delivered at TEDxKakumaCamp, Kakuma, Kenya.https://hdl.handle.net/1794/2330310 pagesIn 1994 I carefully followed the reports of the genocide occurring in Rwanda where some 800,000 people were murdered in about 100 days. I was shocked by the indifference of the American public to this terrible news and angered by the refusal of the world’s governments to intervene and stop the bloodshed. I’m a researcher who studies the psychology of risk and decision making. And after the Rwandan genocide, my colleagues and I decided to study why we are so often indifferent to genocide and other mass atrocities and fail to intervene to prevent them from occurring. Through my research, I’ve learned something disturbing, and that is “the more who die, the less we care.” Today I am going to explain what our research shows about why we are so often indifferent to genocides and mass atrocities and then offer some recommendations about how we might overcome the mistakes we make in our “arithmetic of compassion.”en-USCreative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0-USCompassionGenocidePsychic numbingRefugeesPresentation