kb/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compassion_fade-3.md

title	chunk	source	category	tags	date_saved	instance
Compassion fade	4/6	https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compassion_fade	reference	science, encyclopedia	2026-05-05T13:44:00.490623+00:00	kb-cron

Identifiable Victim Effect (aka, the singularity effect) refers to the concept that people are more willing to help a single, identifiable victim than multiple, non-identified ones. The singularity effect has been found to work even in the circumstance of an individual victim contrasted against a pair of victims. When a charity presents two victims over a singular victim results show that a significantly larger amount of donations are made towards the singular victim. Less effect was also found to be felt for the paired victims. This finding provides evidence of how compassion fade is caused by an emotional reaction to a stimulus, as when people feel less affect, they are less likely to donate or provide help towards a cause. The researchers also measured the level to which participants believed their donation would make a difference to the children's lives. Comparisons between the singular child condition and the paired children condition show there was not a significant difference in perceived probability that the donation will improve their lives. This shows how perceived utility is not causing this effect of compassion fade. Instead of making rational judgments in line with the expected utility theory the singularity effect shows how compassion fade is the result of making decisions via the affect heuristic. There have also been other proposed reasonings for the singularity effect. It has been proposed that the singularity effect occurs due to prospect theory. This reasoning states that the singularity effect occurs because two is not perceived by the brain to have twice the utility of one so there is a diminishing sense of utility as the sample size increases. Additionally, other explanations state that the singularity effect only occurs when people have no prior knowledge of the situation they are making a decision on. In a study which looked at donations to help pandas, environmentalists evenly donated to both the single panda in need and a group of 8 pandas, whereas non-environmentalists donated a significantly larger amount to the single panda. This shows how when participants are led to decide as an emotional response, as the non-environmentalist did, compared to those who already had substantial knowledge there is more evidence of compassion fade. This effect of compassion fade does not engage system two and only occurs when we are reliant on system 1.

=== Other effects === Pseudo-inefficacy means people are less willing to provide aid to one person once they become aware of the larger scope of people whom they are unable to help. This comes as result of people's willingness to help being motivated by the perceived efficacy of their contribution. Pseudo-inefficacy is influenced by self-efficacy (i.e. perceived ability to help) and response efficacy (i.e. the expected effect of help). Evidence shows increasing self-efficacy increases perceived response efficacy thus increasing charitable behaviour. The prominence effect is a situation where an individual favour the option that is superior based upon the most important attribute. In circumstances where more socially desired attributes are given priority, the decision is more easily accepted and justified. The proportion dominance effect explains how people are not motivated to save the maximum number of lives but are motivated to help causes which have the highest proportion of lives saved.

== Real-world effects and experiments == In the early 2000s, research by behavioural economist Daniel Kahneman found that people have different emotional and cognitive reactions to numerical information. Similar research by Slovic in 2007 demonstrated people's emotional responses decreased as the number of lives increase which led to the development of Compassion fade. Some economic theorists have argued that, because emotions and helping behaviour should track the number of people in need of help, people should respond more strongly when more people are suffering, whatever the context. Yet, when psychologists measure actual emotion and helping behaviour, this is not the observed result. Rather, people tend to experience strong emotion in response to one individual in need of aid, and this translates into a strong desire to help; but when there are many individuals, people actually feel less emotion and act less charitably.

=== News media === How the news events are presented affects viewers frame events. According to Mark Hay, the massacre carried out by Boko Haram from 3–7 January 2015 received almost no immediate media attention; however, on January 7, when 12 satirists from Charlie Hebdo magazine were killed in Paris, "the media erupted (and continues to erupt) with heartfelt outrage and constant coverage." Journalists like Simon Allison of the Daily Maverick have argued that, while biased media coverage is a sign that the media and the world do not mourn deaths in Africa the way they do in the West, such bias also points towards a more understated failure in people's natural human ability to gather any empathy as the number of victims rise following a mass killing or to see past the fact that numbers of people are not people, but that they are numbers.

In her book, European Foreign Conflict Reporting: A Comparative Analysis of Public News, Emma Heywood outlined the ways in which mass tragedies are presented, which can determine the amount of compassionate responses elicited.Techniques, which could raise compassion amongst the viewers, and which prevail on New at Ten, are disregarded, allowing the victims to remain unfamiliar and dissociated from the viewer. This approach does not encourage viewers to engage with the sufferers, rather releases them from any responsibility to participate emotionally. Instead compassion values are sidelined and potential opportunities to dwell on victim coverage are replaced by images of fighting and violence.