We were told it was the 18th school shooting in the United States this year; that there have been 1,607 mass shootings since the slaughter in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012. We were reminded it was only five months ago that a gunman killed 58 in Las Vegas, and that a year and a half has passed since 49 died in a nightclub shooting in Orlando. [...]
There’s a profound and infuriating psychological concept that can help explain increasing numbness in the face of long, slow-burning tragedy like mass gun violence in America. It’s this: As the number of victims in a tragedy increases, our empathy, our willingness to do something, reliably decreases. [...]
“There is no constant value for a human life,” University of Oregon psychologist Paul Slovic, the leading expert on psychic numbing, told me last year in an interview I can’t stop thinking about. “The value of a single life diminishes against the backdrop of a larger tragedy.”
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