Psychic Numbing

Situationist Contributor, Paul Slovic and his co-authors (including Situationist friend, Andrew Woods) just posted their superb chapter, titled “Psychic Numbing and Mass Atrocity” (in  The Behavioral Foundations of Policy, E. Shafir, ed., Russell Sage Foundation and Princeton University Press, 2011) on SSRN.  Here’s the abstract.

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The 20th Century is often said to be the bloodiest century in recorded history. In addition to its wars, the century witnessed many grave and widespread human rights abuses. But what stands out in historical accounts of those abuses, perhaps even more than the cruelty of their perpetration, is the inaction of bystanders. Why do people and their governments repeatedly fail to react to genocide and other mass scale human rights violations?

A chapter in Eldar Shafir’s edited volume, The Behavioral Foundations of Policy, forthcoming from the Russell Sage Foundation and Princeton University Press. Posted on SSRN in advance of publication with kind permission from Princeton University Press.

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Download the chapter for free.

Related Situationist posts:

• Too Many To Care
• Numbed By Numbers
• Heart, Brain, or Wallet…How Do You Vote?
• An Apathy Epidemic
• The Situation of Altruism
• Psychology of Inequality
• The Political Situation of the Economic Inequality
• Robert Reich on the Unequal Situation of the Great Recession
• “Even monkeys know when they’re being treated unfairly,”
• “Monkey Fairness,”
• “A Discussion about (In)Equality,” and
• “The Interior Situational Reaction to Inequality.”

For related scholarship, see Paul Slovic’s Book, The Construction of Preference.