Why do we care more about the miners in Chile than the flood victims in Pakistan?

We have a bias in favor of "specific" victims.

"We are much less interested in helping a victim – we only want to help the victim," Jonah Lehrer says in that blog post. He correctly calls this "deeply irrational." It makes no sense to distinguish between people who are "specific" and those who aren't. Everyone is a specific individual!

Lehrer quotes a new study that asked people questions to try to determine how much they used analytical thought as opposed to hunches. The more analytical people showed less of an emotional bias in favor of specifically identified victims:

Individual differences in analytic (“rational”) processing style moderated the effects of different request types on donations to a Zambian relief fund. Less-analytic processors donated more to a single identified victim than to requests describing statistical victims or a combination of both; more-analytic processors showed no differences.

Lehrer also notes:

[T]he floods in Pakistan have received far less attention than warranted, in part because most of the stories focus on the vast scope of the disaster, and not on individual tragedies.

There are a couple ways that the "focus on the vast scope" could diminish people's caring. Lehrer means it causes us to view the victims as faceless and indistinct. But that wouldn't seem to fully explain the disparity: we are seeing photos of specific victims in the flood, not just statistics.

Another factor is that, even if we understand that the flood is taking an enormous human toll, the huge scale (it's said to have affected 20% of Pakistan, which has a population of 170 million) makes it seem so unmanageable that we instinctively throw up our hands. Trying to solve the problems seems hopeless. With the trapped miners, there's a discrete mission that needs to be accomplished, and we can imagine instantly feeling joyous once it's over. Despite the suffering and anxiety, the miners can eventually be reunited with their loved ones, and everyone will have a new perspective on life. With Pakistan, the best imaginable success would be to gradually mitigate the enormous damage; saving everyone or nearly everyone is out of the question. It's similar to why movies with happy endings are so popular.

"Comfortable Zionism has become a moral abdication."

Peter Beinart, who admits that he "was comfortable there too," explains why "the American Jewish establishment" has lost its former luster among a new generation of Jews. (Via.)

A sample:

[T]he message of the American Jewish establishment and its allies in the Netanyahu government is . . . : since Jews are history’s permanent victims, always on the knife-edge of extinction, moral responsibility is a luxury Israel does not have. Its only responsibility is to survive. As former Knesset speaker Avraham Burg writes in his remarkable 2008 book, The Holocaust Is Over; We Must Rise From Its Ashes, "Victimhood sets you free."

This obsession with victimhood lies at the heart of why Zionism is dying among America’s secular Jewish young. It simply bears no relationship to their lived experience, or what they have seen of Israel’s. Yes, Israel faces threats from Hezbollah and Hamas. Yes, Israelis understandably worry about a nuclear Iran. But the dilemmas you face when you possess dozens or hundreds of nuclear weapons, and your adversary, however despicable, may acquire one, are not the dilemmas of the Warsaw Ghetto. The year 2010 is not, as Benjamin Netanyahu has claimed, 1938. The drama of Jewish victimhood—a drama that feels natural to many Jews who lived through 1938, 1948, or even 1967—strikes most of today’s young American Jews as farce.

As John McWhorter has argued in a different context, the sense of victimhood, even if it begins as an entirely appropriate reaction to horrendous injustices against the victimized group, can gradually make a "transformation . . . from a problem to be solved into an identity in itself." (That's from page 2 of his 2000 book Losing the Race -- a brilliant page-turner that I give my highest recommendation.)

Previously on this blog: "How to think: Minimize your identity?"

Which victims do we care about?

"[I]n the hierarchy of victimhood, young beats old, female beats male, domestic beats foreign, fur beats scales, defenseless beats well-armed, pregnant beats nonpregnant, and kittens beat everything."

So says this Slate article on why the press gets hoodwinked by fake victims. Of course, the point also applies to real victims.

Do you think an earlier -- perhaps censored -- draft of the article had one more item in that list: "white beats black"?

As for the part about "female beats male," I'd be interested to know if Nicholas Kristof honestly disagrees with that observation.