Compassion Fade

Compassion fade is the tendency for people's empathy and willingness to help to decrease, rather than increase, as the number of people known to be suffering or in need grows larger, so that appeals describing a single identified victim often generate more concern and more donations than appeals describing the same or a larger need affecting many people. The psychologist and decision researcher Paul Slovic is credited with developing and naming the concept, building on his related idea of psychic numbing, the diminished emotional sensitivity to loss of life that sets in as the scale of a tragedy grows beyond what a person can readily picture. Slovic and the psychologist Deborah Small have also described a related pattern they call the collapse of compassion, and the affect heuristic, in which decisions are guided by an immediate emotional reaction rather than a calculation involving numbers, is commonly cited as the mechanism most responsible for the effect.