Confronting the Deadly Arithmetic of Compassion

We are faced with enormous challenges in the 21st century: climate change, nuclear proliferation, mass atrocities, a deadly pandemic. One thing each of these challenges has in common is they are so large in scale that we easily become numb to their victims. In psychology, this is called psychic numbing.

Recently, Paul Slovic, an expert in risk perception and a contributor to the Arithmetic of Compassion website, delivered a keynote address at the British Psychological Society’s online conference that addressed these very issues. The editor for British Psychological Society’s magazine has written up a summary of the talk. You read a summary of Paul Slovic’s keynote address here:

The More Who Die, the Less We Care: Confronting the Deadly Arithmetic of Compassion and the World’s Urgent’s Problems