PSYCHIC NUMBING THROUGH 
PHOTOGRAPHS: DO WE RESPOND MORE 
TO ONE OR MANY PHOTOS OF 
CHILDREN IN NEED? 
 
 
 
 
by 
Jupiter Breuner 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
A THESIS 
 
Presented to the Department of Psychology  
and the Robert D. Clark Honors College  
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of  
Bachelor of Science 
 
June 2019 
 
 
 
 
An Abstract of the Thesis of 
Jupiter Breuner for the degree of Bachelor of Science 
in the Department of Psychology to be taken June 2019 
 
 
Title:  PSYCHIC NUMBING THROUGH PHOTOGRAPHS: DO WE RESPOND 
MORE TO ONE OR MANY PHOTOS OF CHILDREN IN NEED? 
 
 
 
 
Approved: Dr. Paul Slovic 
 
 
  
This thesis took an in-depth analysis of the change in overall emotional affect 
after viewing images of refugee children. Using the previous research on Psychic 
Numbing and the effect of photographs on human emotions, we wanted to analyze to 
see if people experience more or less of an emotional shift when viewing 1, 4 or 10 
photos of refugee children.  
The term Psychic Numbing refers to the overall emotional numbness one feels 
toward large groups of people suffering as opposed to an individual. Individuals receive 
much more compassion as well as donations as proven time and time again in social 
psychology studies. This study hopes to determine if viewing 1 photo of a single 
refugee child receives more extreme emotional responses than 10 photos of individual 
refugee children.  
  
ii 
 
 
 
Acknowledgements 
 
I would like to thank Professor Paul Slovic, Professor Louise Bishop and 
Marcus Mayorga for helping me to fully create and conduct a study that contained the 
expertise and subject pool of a well-organized research facility. To Paul, thanks for 
allowing me to use DR’s resources and making me feel as if I had the ability to conduct 
a study all on my own. To Professor Bishop, at this point in college I can firmly say that 
I would not have enjoyed college as much without you in it; you are truly one of a kind. 
To Marcus, thanks for letting me ask you countless questions about SPSS and not 
getting too frustrated with my constant emails and texts. To Mom and Dad, thanks for 
putting up with me throughout these last four years, y’all are amazing.   
iii 
 
 
 
Table of Contents 
 
Introduction 1 
Methods 11 
Results 14 
Discussion 16 
Appendix 21 
Bibliography 26 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
iv 
 
 
 
List of Figures  
 
Figure 1 – Aylan Kurdi (Demir, 2015) 2 
Figure 2 – Number of daily donations to a Swedish Red Cross campaign designated 
specifically for aiding Syrian refugees in Sweden (Slovic et. al, 2017). 3 
Figure 3 – Civilians fleeing from gunfighting in Aleppo (Al Halabi, 2015). 5 
Figure 4 – Civilians in body bags after a nerve gas attack near Damascus (Khabieh, 
2015). 6 
Figure 5 – Children await medical care in Damascus (CNN, 2014). 6 
Figure 6 – Image of Emotional Affect Slider 12 
Figure 7 – Graph of affect change 14 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
v 
 
 
 
List of Tables  
 
Table 1 – Mean Affect Ratings 15 
vi 
 
 
Introduction 
Does one photo of a singular child in a refugee situation have a larger effect on 
the overall emotional state of the viewer than 10 separate photos of singular refugee 
children? To answer this question, this thesis first tells the story of a photo of a single 
child that broke through to a media-saturated audience’s hearts and pocketbooks. It then 
continues with a review of past research done on the phenomena of Psychic Numbing 
and the Singularity effect. Next it goes into how those two phenomena manifest 
themselves in the viewing of images. Finally, it debriefs the core study of the thesis in 
which subjects were given either 1, 4 or 10 photos of a refugee child in sequence to see 
if there was a significant difference in their overall emotional affect between the 
conditions.  
In September of 2015, a photo of a small boy named Aylan Kurdi lying lifeless 
on a Turkish beach appeared in media outlets worldwide. The image came from Syria. 
The Syrian civil war had been raging there for four years by September of 2015, and 
every day thousands of pictures of its victims and refugees were taken by the world’s 
press and released to the public. On the one hand, the purpose was to inform. On the 
other, the photos revealed attempts to create awareness of the war in Syria to spread 
understanding of this humanitarian crisis and motivate actions to end it. Yet this one 
photo received much more measurable attention than the rest in terms of donations and 
Google searches (Slovic et. al, 2017). The photo of Aylan Kurdi lying lifeless, face 
down on a beach sparked an outpouring of public support and donations for 
organizations dedicated to helping the refugees in this crisis. See figure 1 for the image.  
 
 
 
 
 
Figure 1 – Aylan Kurdi (Demir, 2015) 
For reference, Aylan’s photo was released by Nilufer Demir of the Dogan News 
Agency of Turkey on September 3rd, 2015. Donations towards aid organizations 
reached new heights after this photo was released by its photographer. See Figure 2.  
 
 
2 
 
 
 
Figure 2 – Number of daily donations to a Swedish Red Cross campaign designated 
specifically for aiding Syrian refugees in Sweden (Slovic et. al, 2017). 
 
In an ideal world, a story of a war-torn country with a struggling population 
would motivate every capable human to do what they could to help end the suffering of 
innocent civilians. The sad truth about reality is that humans are still learning how to 
empathize and feel compassion towards those outside of their specific ‘in-group’. These 
stories about war-torn countries are never just about one person who has been affected 
by these issues, it often comes in scales of tens of thousands of people struggling in 
these conflicts.  
 But the human mind has difficulty empathizing with large groups of people. 
Humans relying on fast, intuitive, “gut feelings” cannot accurately appreciate the 
difference in scale between the death of one and the death of one thousand. This 
phenomenon is known as Psychic Numbing (Slovic, 2007). Psychic numbing can be 
described by an analogy about noise.  
3 
 
 
Imagine you are in a room that is silent. Then imagine that you hear a water 
droplet hit the floor from the ceiling. The noise is very noticeable because it is very easy 
to tell the difference between silence and a noise such as a drop of water hitting the 
ground. Then imagine that you are in the same room but this time there is a faucet 
spraying water onto the ground and it is very loud. If a single water droplet were to fall 
and hit the ground from the ceiling, do you think you could hear it? The answer is no. 
Now imagine instead of water droplets, it was statistics you hear about loss of human 
life. You will likely focus much more on one death than the many. This is called the 
singularity effect. 
When you hear about one death, your mind can empathize with that specific 
person and their family and you can recognize how terrible of a tragedy it is to lose that 
life. But when you hear about the loss of 31 lives, compared to the loss of 30, you won’t 
feel a difference between the two. This is psychic numbing (Slovic, 2007).  
Another example of psychic numbing that can be applied more directly to mass 
atrocities and genocide is a poem written by Zbigniew Herbert called Mr. Cogito Reads 
the Newspaper. The poem has a protagonist named Mr. Cogito, and when he opens his 
morning newspaper, he sees multiple front-page stories. The first headline is a list of 
casualties in a distant war – 120 casualties to be exact. Another headline details a 
gruesome homicide with a single picture of the perpetrator. Mr. Cogito glosses 
indifferently over the story of the distant soldiers and plunges with ‘delight into the 
description of everyday horror’ in the story of the homicide. In explaining why the story 
of the soldiers was not as interesting to Mr. Cogito, the narrator explains that these 
casualties ‘do not speak to the imagination’ quite simply because there are ‘too many of 
4 
 
 
them’. The sheer number of them is so great that it ‘changes them into abstraction’ 
(Herbert, 1995). Obviously, Mr. Cogito is an allusion to humanity and our inability to 
fully understand the compassion required to appreciate mass losses of life. 
Going back to Syria, the Syrian civil war started in March of 2011 following 
protests by the general population against the totalitarian regime of Bashar al-Assad. By 
the time Aylan’s photo appeared in the press in late 2015, 260,000 Syrians had already 
died in the civil war. The press had been covering the conflict very closely, and every 
day photos were published of civilians caught in the crossfire. Here are some of those 
images: 
 
Figure 3 – Civilians fleeing from gunfighting in Aleppo (Al Halabi, 2015).  
 
5 
 
 
 
Figure 4 – Civilians in body bags after a nerve gas attack near Damascus (Khabieh, 
2015). 
 
 
Figure 5 – Children await medical care in Damascus (CNN, 2014). 
 
From the moment that this conflict began, photos and statistics were being 
published to attempt to bring public attention to these mass atrocities. Yet for four years 
6 
 
 
the general public turned a blind eye to the Syrian people and did not feel obligated to 
help them. But in September of 2015 the photo of Aylan was published and within days 
citizens of the world were frantically searching for ways that they could help end this 
crisis as previously shown in the graph of donations to the Swedish Red Cross in figure 
2.  
Compassion fade is the phenomenon in which people tend to respond greatest to 
individual people in stories inciting compassion and affect change, and respond least to 
groups of people in stories. One study by Daniel Vjastfjall and colleagues titled 
Compassion Fade: Affect and Charity Are Greatest for a Single Child in Need, looked 
at whether specific numbers of people in messages for charitable organizations garner 
more or fewer donations than others. The study found that these messages were most 
effective at producing donations and compassion when there was only one person 
described in the story. The study suggested that having the ability to individually relate 
with someone and connect to their story leads the participants to feel more empathetic 
towards them, this is another manifestation of the singularity effect. It also concluded 
that when there are many people in a single photo the participants cannot fully 
empathize with all of them so, in turn, they feel less compassion towards them. 
Compassion fade shows that we relate strongest to individuals and weakest to groups. 
In comparing the photo of Aylan on the beach with the photo of the bodies lined 
up in body bags, one would assume through simple arithmetic that 20 lifeless bodies 
would spur more compassion than that of a single child: more bodies, more compassion. 
That was not the case. Aylan’s photo reached far more people than any other photo in 
the Syrian Refugee Crisis. Our experiment reaffirms how little the difference is between 
7 
 
 
viewing one and viewing many photos of atrocities; that repetition of photos does not 
increase compassion. 
How does one photo of a child change the world? Should non-profit 
organizations use single photos in their advertisements or sequences of photos? These 
are all very great questions, ones that we plan on answering in this paper. 
Psychic Numbing and the Singularity Effect help explain why when one is 
reading an article about a mass atrocity in another country, rarely does the story of 
millions of helpless people dying motivate someone to donate resources to help the 
victims. The reader likely feels some semblance of pity then continues to move on 
about their day. However, images such as the one of Aylan have had the power to cause 
people to stop what they are doing and immediately wonder how they can help (Jaiswal, 
2016).  
Another major contributing factor to Aylan’s story and why it was so captivating 
is the medium in which it was delivered: an image. The phrases “a picture tells a 
thousand words” and “seeing is believing” are idioms that everyone has heard at some 
point in their lifetime. Research has found that humans respond more strongly to images 
than simple statistics (Slovic, 2016). These studies have analyzed the intersection 
between emotional responses and monetary donations and have found that images 
typically elicit much more pronounced reactions from the subjects. Images allow 
humans to see the world from another perspective, whereas statistics just appear as 
emotionless numbers on a page. A single photo of a child feels far more important than 
many statistical lives. A study performed by Paul Slovic and colleagues found that the 
image of Aylan Kurdi provoked far more concern about Syrian refugees as well as 
8 
 
 
donations than did the statistics of hundreds of thousands of deaths and other photos of 
the crisis that had been ongoing for four years.  
There has been considerable research done on compassion and the limits of our 
own emotions when it comes to helping those in need. Studies conducted by Daniel 
Vjastfjall, Paul Slovic, and many others have looked directly as to why certain photos or 
stories garner much more public support than others.  
 Another article that ties directly into the reasoning as to why the subjects in the 
previous study could not relate as well to the larger groups is the article by Paul Slovic 
titled Psychic Numbing and Genocide. People will attend to stories about one particular 
person who has been the victim of a terrible tragedy that has affected thousands, and 
because of that one story there will be a massive outpouring of public support. In the 
face of straight statistics about genocides and mass atrocities, however, humans will feel 
less motivated to help the cause because of their inability to empathize with those 
numbers. Instead of valuing each life as equal and the loss of it a tragedy, the more loss 
of life there is, the more numb we become to the heartbreak. As stated earlier, however, 
images differ from statistics in their access to emotionality. 
The photo of Aylan was able to access the singularity effect, overcoming 
psychic numbing, and demonstrating humanity’s sensitivity to images more than 
statistics, as well as many other phenomena. In viewing Aylan’s photo and the 
overwhelming response, one can ask whether this phenomenon can be applied to many 
individual photos of children in refugee environments? 
9 
 
 
This is what our study is hoping to discover. Normally, the photos of the Syrian 
conflict tended to have many other people in the photo, and over time one sees many 
photos of individuals and groups. 
This study examines whether people’s emotional state changes when seeing 
either 1 photo of a sad child, 4 photos, or 10 photos.  
10 
 
 
Methods 
Participants were 350 Americans who volunteered to participate in an online 
survey for a small amount of money. The average age of the participants was 31, with 
208 males and 141 females. 80% of the participants have either graduated from or 
attended some college. 47% racially identified as white, 27% as Asian, 8% African 
American, and 7% Hispanic. About one half self-identified as politically liberal and the 
other half identified as conservative. The subject pool was vetted by first having the 
participants indicate their political beliefs on a scale of 1 through 5 with 1 being very 
conservative and 5 being very liberal. Those who selected the moderate option, number 
3 on the scale, were removed from consideration to analyze whether there was a 
difference in the responses between those who identified as liberal or conservative. 
Once the participant fulfilled the criteria to continue the survey they were then 
asked to answer on a sliding scale their general temperament at the time of beginning 
the survey, with one end of the slider indicating that they feel ‘Bad’ and the other end 
feeling ‘Good’. The sliding scale ranged from 0-100, although the subjects did not see a 
numerical coefficient attached to the slider. This is shown in Figure 6. 
11 
 
 
 
Figure 6 – Image of Emotional Affect Slider 
 
After indicating their initial temperament, the subjects were randomly split into 
three conditions. The first condition saw one photo of a child randomly selected from a 
set of ten, with a small paragraph stating that the photographed child was an orphan due 
to the ongoing war in their country that killed their parents. The second condition saw 
four random photos of children in succession, taken from this same set of ten photos, 
and then recorded their emotional response to the final photo. The third condition saw 
10 random photos of children and then recorded their emotional response to the final 
photo. The subjects were not told how many photos they were about to see. In every 
condition, the participants had to view each photo (1, 4, or 10) for 5 seconds. These 
photos are available in the appendix at the end of the report. The instructions for the 
images read:  
This photo was taken from the files of humanitarian agencies monitoring 
crisis agencies around the world. This child’s parents recently died in the 
fighting in their region.  This child is now a refugee and is looking for a 
new home. Please look at this photo and rate your feelings toward the 
image you see using the sliding scales below. 
The purpose of this paragraph was to provide the participant with some context as to the 
background story of the children that they were viewing in the photographs. 
After viewing the 1, 4, or 10 photos, the participants then reported through 
separate sliders how the last image made them feel overall (overall affect) and also how 
12 
 
 
compassionate, angry, sad, and hopeful the image made them feel. This was to achieve 
reliability between each condition so as to have the subjects all respond to one image 
with the only difference between conditions being the amount of priming they received 
through one, four, or ten photographs. 
13 
 
 
Results 
The subjects’ overall affect was influenced by viewing the sad faced photos of 
the children. Before viewing the photos, the average emotional state across all three 
conditions was at a 78 out of 100, and after viewing the average decreased to 33 out of 
100. See Figure 7. 
 
Figure 7 – Graph showing affect change 
 
Although there was a statistically significant difference in affect before and after 
viewing the photos, there was no significant effect of the number of photos seen (1, 4, 
or 10) on the pre photo viewing, post-photo viewing and change in affect. Essentially, 
the affect was similar enough in all conditions that no significant difference was found 
between them. A one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) between subjects was 
conducted to compare the change in overall affect with the number of pictures seen. 
14 
 
 
There was not a significant effect of number of pictures seen and change in affect at the 
p < .05 level for the three conditions [F(2, 341) = .677, p = .509]. There was also no 
effect of the political leaning of the participants and their emotional affect change. 
For each participant, the change in affect before the viewing and after the 
viewing is going to be referred to as the ‘difference score’. The higher the difference 
score, the more negative was the affect of the post-photo viewing compared to the pre-
photo viewing. There were small differences in the difference score between the three 
conditions. The single photo condition’s difference score was 42.8, the four photo 
condition was a shift of 46, and the ten photo condition had a change of 48.1. Although 
there was some variation in the difference scores between the conditions, there was no 
statistically significant effect. In addition to analyzing the difference score, the 
differences between the conditions in just their post-photo emotional affect showed no 
significant effect (see Table 1). 
 
Survey Responses Condition 
 1 4 10 
Pre-Photo emotional Affect: How are you feeling 
overall? (0=bad to 100=Good) 78.3 77.7 80.5 
Post Photo Emotional Affect: How does this image make 
you feel? (0=bad to 100=good) 36.0 31.3 32.4 
Difference Score: Pre minus Post 42.8 46.0 48.1 
Table 1 – Mean Affect Ratings 
 
15 
 
 
Discussion 
Viewing the photos of the refugee children made almost all participants feel 
worse, which shows that the images did have an impact. Our aim in showing these 
pictures to the subjects was to see whether their overall emotional affect would change 
for the worse because of the children in the photos, and that effect was shown very 
clearly. After viewing the photos, the average participant’s general affect was decreased 
(ie, became more negative) by 45 points on a scale of 1-100. The story of the 
child/children and the images resonated with the subjects.  
Our expected effect was that the largest difference score would be in response to 
the single photo condition, and the smallest difference score would occur for the 10 
photo condition because of previous research done on the compassion fade phenomenon 
in which people relate strongest to individuals and weakest to groups. This was not the 
case. 
There were no significant differences in respondent’s post-photo affect, or their 
overall difference score between any of the conditions. Based on the past research done 
on psychic numbing, we assumed that after having to view 10 separate photos of 
children for five seconds, a numbing effect would reduce the difference between pre 
and post photo affective feelings in response to the last photo compared to the single 
photo. This was not shown in this study. All three conditions were very similar in their 
post photo affect and their difference score.  
With no prior knowledge of psychic numbing and the research surrounding it, 
one would assume that as number of victims increased, overall emotional affect shift 
would increase as well. But, as was predicted, there was no significant increase in 
16 
 
 
difference score as the number of images was increased. The subjects did not feel worse 
after viewing 10 photos compared to 1.  This is consistent with prior research that 
shows that, as the number of victims increase in statistical reports of mass atrocities, 
there is no increase in compassion or donations. This time, however, the change of 
medium to photos from simple statistical reports did not cause this phenomenon to 
disappear. 
This study did differ from past research on psychic numbing and specifically 
compassion fade as there was no major decrease in emotion as the number of victims 
increased. In past research, one of the observed effects of compassion fade as it pertains 
to psychic numbing is that people feel the largest emotional affect shift when there is 
one victim in need and feel the smallest shift when there are many victims. In our study 
there was no significant difference between the conditions, which means that there was 
no decrease in emotional affect shift as the number of victims increased. This was not 
the expected effect of our study; we hypothesized that there would be a significant 
decrease in emotional affect change as number of victims increased. 
The fact that seeing one photo, four photos, and ten photos did not make any 
difference can mean many things. The most likely explanation as to why there was no 
difference between the conditions is that in every condition, the subjects simply rated 
their response to viewing the last photo they had seen while paying no mind to the 
previous photos. This would be possible because as they were recording their responses 
the only image they could see was the last single image that had been randomly 
generated directly above the questions. The reason why the previous photos may have 
17 
 
 
had no effect may be because the singularity effect discussed earlier was strong enough 
in the last photo to eliminate the differences between each condition.  
The singularity effect reflects a focus much more on saving the individual life as 
opposed to saving a large number of lives. This is due to our ability to connect and 
empathize with a single human being much more than a large group of them. This is 
what could have happened in the viewing of the final photo in each condition. The 
desire to express compassion to the child that they were seeing in the photo was strong 
enough to overcome the impact of the photos they had seen previously.  
Another possibility is that the design of the study reinforced the singularity 
effect. The participants were forced to look at 4 or 10 individual pictures for 5 seconds. 
Viewing the image of each child for 5 seconds could have made the participants 
individually relate to each image separately and experiencing a separate singularity 
effect for each child.   
In order to further test the hypothesis that repeated exposure to photos would 
become numbing, there are some changes that could be made to the study. First, I would 
tell the subjects to respond to all of the images, not just the last image. I would also 
make it so the last photo was not visible when recording responses and allow the 
subjects to click through each photo at their own pace while timing them, and also have 
more than 10 photos in the 3rd condition. One would predict the subjects would click 
through faster as they proceeded through the set, most notably for 10 photos but 
especially more for a condition with 20 or 30 photos. We could analyze how long they 
spent on each photo as well to see at what point they began skimming over photos of 
children. 
18 
 
 
The change of having the subjects respond to the group of photos and not only 
the last photo might produce a greater difference between the three conditions and could 
allow the singularity effect of the final image to be mitigated. This change would treat 
the group of images as less of a priming mechanism for the participant, so that they are 
emotionally responding to them as a whole. This would also require for the responses to 
be on a separate page from the last photo. 
The removal of the last photo above the response scale might remove the 
singularity effect experienced in response to the last photo. The subjects would not be 
faced with a single sad face of a child when responding about their overall affect, they 
would only have the memory of how many images they had previously seen. This 
would remove the singularity effect of the last image and cause the subjects to respond 
to the group of images as a whole.  
By allowing the subjects to move through the photographs as quickly as they 
want, we could then record how much time they spent on each page and see exactly 
when they begin to stop viewing each page individually and begin skipping through as a 
result of numbness. 
Lastly, by giving larger differences in number of photos between the conditions, 
we would be able to achieve more pronounced effects between each condition. If 
psychic numbing is at its most prevalent when it comes to statistics in the thousands, 
then having more photos could very well increase the likelihood of that result. 
This type of study has great potential to explain how people respond to 
sequences of photos and stories of children in crisis situations. Although this study 
specifically did not find the predicted effect of psychic numbing, with some minor 
19 
 
 
tweaks this study might find those phenomena. Doing that would allow non-profit 
organizations hoping to maximize their donations to learn from this data to show that 
more pictures of those in need is not necessarily the best course of action. In due time, 
this type of study will hopefully give the world more knowledge as to how the human 
brain and the emotions within it function in socially important situations. 
20 
 
 
Appendix 
Ten photos used in study: 
21 
 
 
22 
 
 
23 
 
 
24 
 
 
25 
 
 
 
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