Genocide Prevention Initiative

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https://hdl.handle.net/1794/18929

“Genocide & Mass Atrocities: Responsibility to Prevent,” (GPI) is a University of Oregon community initiative, and is one of the four signature programs sponsored by the Savage Endowment.

The Genocide Prevention Initiative (GPI) examines personal and political responses to mass atrocities from the perspective of numerous disciplines. It has been spearheaded by the University of Oregon School of Law’s Appropriate Dispute Resolution Center, in partnership with the Global Justice Program and the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs.

The initiative aims to bridge scholarship and advocacy, while raising awareness, engaging the campus community, and encouraging action. It is inspired by the work of Dr. Paul Slovic, UO Professor of Psychology and internationally renowned scholar in the areas of decision research, psychic numbing, and apathy to genocide.

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    Whoever Saves One Life Saves the World: Confronting the Challenge of Pseudoinefficacy
    (2014) Vastfjall, Daniel; Slovic, Paul; Mayorga, Marcus
    In a great many situations where we are asked to aid persons whose lives are endangered, we are not able to help everyone. What do we then do? In a series of experiments, we first demonstrate that donors, in general, become demotivated by information about children who cannot be helped. We find that negative affect from the children not helped decreases the warm glow associated with aiding the children who can be helped. This demotivation may be a form of “pseudoinefficacy” that is nonrational. We should not be deterred from helping whomever we can because there are others we are not able to help. Second, we show that people react in two ways to such requests. Some feel less good about helping those they can help and they help less. Others feel badly because of those “out of reach” and they become even more motivated to help whomever they can. We discuss the need to better understand these two different reactions and we suggest strategies to reduce the demotivating effects of pseudoinefficacy.
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    Iconic photographs and the ebb and flow of empathic response to humanitarian disasters
    (PNAS, 2017-01-10) Slovic, Paul; Vastfjall, Daniel; Erlandsson, Arvid; Gregory, Robin
    The power of visual imagery is well known, enshrined in such familiar sayings as “seeing is believing” and “a picture is worth a thousand words.” Iconic photos stir our emotions and transform our perspectives about life and the world in which we live. On September 2, 2015, photographs of a young Syrian child, Aylan Kurdi, lying face-down on a Turkish beach, filled the front pages of newspapers worldwide. These images brought much-needed attention to the Syrian war that had resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths and created millions of refugees. Here we present behavioral data demonstrating that, in this case, an iconic photo of a single child had more impact than statistical reports of hundreds of thousands of deaths. People who had been unmoved by the relentlessly rising death toll in Syria suddenly appeared to care much more after having seen Aylan’s photograph; however, this newly created empathy waned rather quickly.We briefly examine the psychological processes underlying these findings, discuss some of their policy implications, and reflect on the lessons they provide about the challenges to effective intervention in the face of mass threats to human well-being.
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    Psychic Numbing and Mass Atrocity
    (Princeton University Press, 2013) Slovic, Paul; Zionts, David; Woods, Andrew K.; Goodman, Ryan; Jinks, Derek
    The twentieth century is often said to have been the bloodiest century in recorded history. In addition to its wars, it witnessed many grave and widespread human rights abuses. But what stands out in historical accounts of those abuses, perhaps even more than the cruelty of their perpetration, is the inaction of bystanders. Why do people and their governments repeatedly fail to react to genocide and other mass-scale human rights violations? There is no simple answer to this question. It is not because people are insensitive to the suffering of their fellow human beings-witness the extraordinary efforts an individual will expend to rescue a person in distress. It is not because people only care about identifiable victims of similar skin color who live nearby: witness the outpouring of aid from the north to the victims of the December 2004 tsunami in Southeast Asia. Nor can the blame be apportioned entirely to political leaders. Although President George W. Bush was unresponsive to the murder of hundreds of thousands of people in Darfur, it was his predecessor, President Bill Clinton, who ignored the genocide in Rwanda, and President Franldin D. Roosevelt who for too long did little to stop the Holocaust. The American example of inaction has been largely repeated in other countries as well. Behind every leader who ignored mass murder were millions of citizens whose indifference allowed the inaction to pass.
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    “Statistics Don’t Bleed”: Rhetorical Psychology, Presence, and Psychic Numbing in Genocide Pedagogy
    (JSTOR, 2011) Frank, David A.; Slovic, Paul; Vastfjall, Daniel
    Desperate to make present the unfolding Holocaust in central Europe, Arthur Koestler in a 1944 article in the New York Times Magazine grouped himself with the "screamers" who were unheard as millions were murdered in the concentration camps. Seeking to explain why "a dog run over by a car upsets our emotional balance and digestion; three million Jews killed in Poland cause but a moderate uneasiness," Koestler observed: "Statistics don't bleed; it is the detail which counts. We are unable to embrace the total process of our awareness; we can only focus on little lumps of reality" ( Yogi92). Matthew J. Newcomb struggles in his classroom and recent article, "Feeling the Vulgarity of Numbers: The Rwandan Genocide and the Classroom as a Site of Response to Suffering," with the problem he, Koestler, and a host of others face when attempting to move people to moral action in response to trauma that may seem beyond the pale of representation.