How Life Adversity Can Make Us Resistant to Psychic Numbing

By Andrew Quist

People are capable of feeling intense emotions when confronted with the suffering of one person, but due to the psychological phenomenon “psychic numbing,” our feelings of compassion do not increase as the number of victims rises. Psychic numbing is an obstacle to dealing with large-scale problems like poverty, famine, and genocide, because it dulls the compassion we feel for the vast numbers of victims of these tragedies, and without feeling compassion, we’re less motivated to help.

Psychologists Daniel Lim and David DeSteno recently published an article in the journal Emotion that provides evidence that people who have suffered severe adversity develop a resistance to psychic numbing and are capable of scaling up their feelings of compassion for larger numbers of victims in distress. This is welcome news because if we can learn what makes these individuals less susceptible to psychic numbing, we may be able to teach everyone to feel more compassion for statistical lives.

Lim and DeSteno presented study participants with a description of the civil war in the Darfur region of Sudan which detailed the war’s devastating effects on civilians. After reading about the war in Darfur, half of the participants were shown a picture of one child who was suffering in the conflict, and the other half were shown a picture of eight children. The participants were asked to describe their feelings of compassion toward the child or group of children. The researchers also asked the participants to complete a questionnaire that measured their experience of traumatic events.

The results of the study showed that people who did not experience adversity in their life showed the same amount of compassion for the group of eight children as they did for one child, which matches results from other studies on psychic numbing. However, the participants who experienced severe life adversity reported feeling more compassion towards the group of eight children compared to one child. In fact, the compassion felt towards the group of eight children was significantly higher for the group of high-adversity individuals compared to the group of low-adversity individuals.

What explains the different reactions between the two groups? Drs. Lim and DeSteno hypothesized that people who overcome adversity may develop the belief that they can make a difference in trying circumstances. This belief may allow them to scale up their compassion as the number of people in distress increases.

Lim and DeSteno tested their hypothesis by running the study again, but adding a question about the participants’ perceived efficacy. The study found that people who suffered adversity held greater beliefs in their own ability to help the children in Darfur than low-adversity individuals, and this difference in perceived efficacy predicted how much compassion the participants felt towards the group of eight children.

These findings have enormous practical implications for helping people overcome psychic numbing. If we can teach people who haven’t faced a tragedy that they too have the power to contribute positively towards solving a difficult problem, they might also become immune to psychic numbing.

Again, Lim and DeSteno set out to test this hypothesis. Before showing study participants the same prompt on the children in Darfur as in the previous studies, Lim and DeSteno manipulated half of the participants’ perceived efficacy with an empathy test. The test included a prompt that informed participants that “people high in empathy are . .  . known to be good at caring for others and to be more successful in alleviating their pain.” After taking the test, half the participants were falsely told they scored high in empathy. As a result of this manipulation, the low-adversity participants reported greater beliefs in efficacy. They also showed an increase in feelings of compassion towards multiple victims. The feelings of compassion the low-adversity participants felt toward the group of eight children matched the amount of compassion felt by the high-adversity participants who did not undergo the manipulation of efficacy beliefs.

For activists and ordinary people trying to make a positive contribution in others’ lives, the lesson from the study is simple and profound: show people that they can make a difference and they’ll be less likely to fall victim to psychic numbing. Remember, even partial solutions save lives.

Work cited:

Lim, D., & DeSteno, D. (2019). Past adversity protects against the numeracy bias in compassion. Emotion. Advance online publication. doi:10.1037/emo0000655