A Morning Show Interview with Paul Slovic

Professor and Arithmetic of Compassion contributor Paul Slovic recently gave an interview on WJOP Radio’s The Morning Show hosted by Mary Jacobsen. Their insightful discussion covered psychic numbing, pseudoinefficacy, the COVID-19 pandemic, and more.

Professor Slovic explained the concept of psychic numbing: we value individual lives greatly, but when the number of people at risk increases, the numbers become an abstraction and we lose our feelings of compassion and motivation to help. This prevents us from taking action to solve problems like genocide, disease, food insecurity, and racial injustice.

Pseudoinefficacy is the false belief that helping one person out of many doesn’t matter. When we become aware of all the people we aren’t helping, our actions feel like a mere drop in the bucket and we lose the motivation to act. This false belief in inefficacy is an illusion because helping even one person matters to that person.

Paul and Mary also discussed the biases and cognitive limitations that prevent people from taking the COVID-19 pandemic as seriously it deserves. Our inability to appreciate exponential growth prevented people from taking necessary precautions early in the pandemic, contributing to its explosion. As time went on, psychological reinforcement principles caused people to give up taking precautions: we don’t feel rewarded for socially distancing or wearing masks because the casualties of the pandemic are hidden from us, but we do feel the burden and inconvenience of the restrictions. To get people to comply with COVID precautions, we need to add external  rewards or punishments.

A video of the interview can be viewed below.