"The reason human beings seem to care so little about mass suffering and death is precisely because the suffering is happening on a mass cale. 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...the hidden brain is simply not calibrated to deal with the differrence between a single death and 20 deaths...Humans are the 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...Compassion fatigue is the inability of people to respond to suffering when the scale or length of the suffering exceeds some astronomical number. Psychologist Paul Slovic's work suggests that compassion fatigue starts when teh number of victims rises from one to two."
Beyond Comprehension
by Shankar Vedantam
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/11/AR2010011102007.html
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