New Research Sheds Light on Our Reactions to Humanitarian Crises

Millions of lives are lost around the world each year to accidents, terrorist attacks, wars, epidemics and natural disasters. What’s more, the prediction is that climate change will increase the number and intensity of some of these events. Newly published research from the ESRC Centre for Economic Learning and Social Evolution (ELSE) suggests that the way people — whether members of the public or policy makers — react when faced with human fatalities is highly dependent on the distribution of death tolls they are typically exposed to

…The research has demonstrated for the first time that our motivation to act is based on our memory of similar events and a comparative, rather than absolute, evaluation of human death tolls. It suggests that reactions to fatalities are fundamentally relative and dependent on personal history.

According to Drs. Olivola and Sagara, we evaluate the seriousness of a disaster by first drawing upon a sample of comparable events from our memory to obtain a set of comparison death tolls. We might, for example, compare a target event with other disasters that we have seen in the news or heard about from talking to family, friends, or colleagues. Then we compare the target event with all those we have drawn from memory. The ‘’shock” associated with a target death toll is simply its relative rank-position within the set of comparison events rather than some fundamental value on a scale of human fatalities. This new research stresses that our responses will be shaped by the environment we live in — in particular the frequency with which we observe small or large death tolls in the news and in our day-to-day lives.

…In line with this prediction, Drs. Olivola and Sagara compared respondents in India, Indonesia, Japan, and the US, and found evidence of greater diminishing sensitivity to fatalities in the latter two countries (which tend to experience relatively fewer large-scale disasters) than in the former two.

“On a theoretical level, this research fundamentally challenges the view that the value we place on human lives is governed by stable underlying disutility functions.

Science Daily