About human compassion

"The problem with human compassion", written by Shankar Vedantam, is retional and logical. According to this article, the reason why people would rather donate money to save an abandoned dog than to save mass scale suffering is because our human brains don't have enough capability to deal with a large number of suffering people. People are more prone to save large proportions of suffering people. Therefore, compared to thousands of homeless or starving people and hungry children, one dog can more activate people's compassion. If the dog was saved, people would be satisfied because they rescued a 100% whole dog whose name and stories were known.

In this event, the media played an important role in transmitting a lot of information to people. From the media, people knew the name and stories about the dog, so they can imagine how poor the dog is and how cute the dog is. In the situation of just one dog, many people feel they have enough money and power to save it. However, when they face thousands of homeless people, they realize they can do onthing.

On 2008.5.12, there was a big earthquake happening in China, which killed 80000 local people, including many children because of the collapse of many schools. As a journalist, my husband went to the earthquake site. Before he went to there, he was excited because it was a good chance for developing his career. To him, thousands of killed people were numbers in his brain. However, when he went there and interviewed some families whose children were killed by the earthquake, he felt pain and desperation. He called me and cried that he even could not stand this tragedy. The interviewed parents told my husband what their chilren liked to do, what games they liked to play, and their favourite colors and pets. When my husband listened to these stories, he started to realize that these killed children are not just numbers published in newspapers, they are sons and daughters; they were human beings.

I believe that the reason why we have no compassion to suffering people partly because we cannot imagine the scene in our brains. If you are on the spot, it is a different story and your heart will be pulled out.