Getting people to care or lend their support to humanitarian causes around the world is difficult. But this is not because people are heartless. Behavioural research can tell us a lot about how hard it can be to trigger empathy. As the number of people we see suffering goes up, our empathy stops increasing and may even go down, in what psychologist Paul Slovic refers to as psychic numbing.
That’s because it’s easier for our brain to process emotions about one person’s suffering than it is for us to empathize with a larger group. Take the Syrian civil war for example, a high casualty conflict where at certain points of the crisis a powerful visual of an identified victim was able to renew public interest and spike aid donations. So, a single compelling story can be effective but only if it’s able to stand out.
“Volume is a huge problem. There are over a million images from Syria that show terrible atrocities in the civil war there and most of us turn our eyes away. We don’t want to watch them”, said Sam Gregory, a program director for WITNESS, a human rights organization focused on video advocacy. The images can also take their toll on us. Researchers at the University of Bradford found that exposure to violent visuals on social media can trigger symptoms similar to post-traumatic stress disorder. So, you could so emotionally burnt out from watching violent police arrests on Facebook for example, that your mind starts to shut down that part of the brain that activates empathy to protect itself. That’s why the way aid groups communicate is key to getting your attention and generating empathy, something they’ve struggled with for years.
In the 80’s, humanitarian videos often focused more closely on major crises and less on individual stories. A typical charity appeal had a depressing soundtrack and images of suffering people without hearing directly from the people portrayed. This approach persisted until the 2000’s, in spite of getting called out for using problematic cliches like images of a helpless African child being rescued by a white savior. Giless de Gilles from Doctors Without Borders believes, “A lot of people now have a predisposition towards humanitarian messaging that is something that is going to make them feel bad. Something that’s going to make them sad”,
We learnt that the old ways of doing storytelling didn’t work. People rejected the story. They rejected the message. They thought they were being exploited by the sort of poverty porn type images of starving people, of people in despair. So, we now have to find new ways of storytelling that don’t just passively present people with problems, but give them ways to act.
Sam Gregory, WITNESS
In January 2018, Amnesty released a shocking ad showing Dutch residents showing a refugee’s journey under hypnosis.
The immersive tool of virtual reality (VR) is a new tool more aid groups are supporting and VR creators say it can spark more empathy than traditional media. The U.N. was the first to use VR around the Syrian conflict. In 2015, they showed their VR documentary about a Syrian refugee girl at a donor event where they nearly doubled their fundraising goal. Gregory from WITNESS said, “Novelty matters. So, the first few instances of this [VR] inevitably have a much greater impact than the next hundred, the next thousand, the next million. One scenario that I find VR particularly powerful for is playing people in scenarios they’ll never be able to go to”.
That’s why Doctors Without Borders decided to take VR out on the road across the American South. They wanted to get to communities that aren’t normally reached. People saw ten VR headsets set up and wanted to know what they were doing. VR is able to give such a more vivid, personal, experience as well as being fully submersive. The exhibit looked at the lives of displaced people on three continents. Events like these help raise awareness about their medical missions.
Although more humanitarian groups are investing in VR immersion doesn’t guarantee empathy or action. “It generates a very ephemeral [short-term] empathy. There’s the possibility that we lapse into this sort of puppet theater of watching the world in its misery and we get that opportunity in VR and other formats of immersive media to kind of have this sort of voyeurism. We have to be very cautious about that. We’re starting to see this explosion of ways to think of VR and immersive media to engage people, and to help them have compassion and solidarity, not just empathy, and to give them understanding and ways to act. Those are the critical elements we need in the next generation of VR”, Gregory said.
Source: Why It’s So Hard To Get People To Care About Humanitarian Crises, VICE News
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