Make Life-and-Death Decisions Analytically, not Emotionally

Source: "Mass Suffering and Why We Look the Other Way" By Shankar Vedantam, The Washington Post, January 5, 2009.

Research by Paul Slovic (University of Oregon) supports the idea that humans have built-in decision making biases that lead to inappropriate allocation of resources in disaster situations, which in turn leads to unnecessary loss of life.

Excerpts from the article:

Slovic did one experiment shortly after the Rwandan genocide. He asked volunteers whether they were willing to spend precious resources getting water to a refugee camp in Zaire, now called Congo. There were many pressing demands for the money, but Slovic told the volunteers that the water could save 4,500 lives. Without the volunteers' awareness, however, the researcher told some people the refugee camp had 11,000 people while telling others that the camp had 100,000 people. The number of lives that could be saved was the same in both cases -- 4,500 -- but Slovic found that people were reluctant to divert resources to save lives in a large camp rather than the same number of lives in a small camp.

In another experiment, Slovic asked people to imagine they were disbursing money on behalf of a large foundation: They could give $10 million to fight a disease that claimed 20,000 lives a year -- and save 10,000 of those lives. But they could also devote the $10 million to fight a disease that claimed 290,000 lives a year -- and this investment would save 20,000 lives.

Slovic found that people preferred to spend the money saving the 10,000 lives in the first scenario rather than the 20,000 lives in the second scenario: "People were responding not to the number of lives saved but the percentage of lives saved," he said. In the one case, their investment could save half the victims; in the case of the more deadly disease, it could save 7 percent of the victims.....

Slovic has also shown that the amount of compassion humans feel can diminish as the number of victims increases: In an experiment in Israel, Slovic asked volunteers whether they would help raise $300,000 to save eight children who were dying of cancer. Those in another group were told only about one child with cancer and asked how much they were willing to donate to save the life of that child. Slovic found that people were willing to give more money to save one life than to save eight.

Comment: There are many studies that show that human decision making can be biased away from the mathematically reasonable due to biases in the ways our brains work. Slovic's research suggests that our emphasis on the small scale humanitarian crisis in Palestine and willingness to ignore the large scale humanitarian crisis in Africa (Congo, Sudan, Darfur, etc.) may be at least partly explained by such a bias. Knowing that such a bias exists may help us to overcome its effects and make better decisions, saving many lives. JAD

Genocide in Rwanda: Click here for image source

The article has a very positive comment with respect to the Obama administration's probable response to humanitarian crises:

Susan E. Rice, Obama's nominee for U.N. ambassador, has said that if a Rwanda-style genocide began again, she "would come down on the side of dramatic action, going down in flames if that was required." Samantha Power, a leading proponent for an interventionist American policy in humanitarian crises, was a senior Obama adviser during the presidential campaign.