Читать книгу The Psychology of Environmental Law - Arden Rowell - Страница 36

Another aspect of diffusion that tends to make environmental impacts harder to for people to care about relates to the so-called “identifiable victim” effect. Generally speaking, the willingness to forgo benefits or to incur costs in order to avoid harming another person or group of people is a form of prosocial, altruistic behavior. Many things, both personal (Penner et al., 1995) and situational (Dovidio et al., 2006), predict willingness to make such sacrifices for the benefit of others. One large predictor is a feeling of identity with the other as suggested by the previous section. Another, though, is the ability to indivdualize the other.

To the extent environmental effects are diffused onto remote individuals—especially those whose particular identities may be hard or even impossible to distinguish—people may empathize with them less than with more easily distinguishable, closer victims. his phenomenon has been experimentally demonstrated: identifiable victims are perceived as more sympathetic, and are more likely to receive our aid than “statistical” or unidentified and unindividuated victims (Loewenstein & Lerner, 2003). Nongovernmental aid organizations have intuited this phenomenon for a long time: Appeals for donations are often accompanied by names and pictures of individual victims of, say, poverty or famine, as a way to increase contributions. In an evocative experiment, merely including a single victim’s name, age, and picture on a donation appeal increased actual donations by 60% (Kogut & Ritov, 2005).

While people’s tendency to empathize with identifiable people may seem benign, even laudable, the phenomenon also has a darker side. Although people empathize with identifiable humans, that empathy can be undermined relatively easily, for instance, simply by telling them that a problem is large or dispersed. In another donation study, for instance, researchers found that people told about the extent of the hunger problem in Africa would donate less to feed a 7-year-old African girl named Rokia than similarly situated people who were told about Rokia but not about the larger problem (Small et al., 2007). Telling people about very large and distant problems is particularly likely to trigger a phenomenon called “psychic numbing” or “compassion fade,” whereby people dim their emotional response to harm (Slovic et al., 2007; Rowell & Wexler, 2014).

The diffusion of many environmental impacts makes it extraordinarily difficult—and sometimes impossible—for individuals to connect the harm of their actions to any identifiable group, much less an identifiable person. Over the coming decades, climate change is expected to substantially increase the likelihood of severe, pervasive, and irreversible outcomes for people and ecosystems around the globe (Pachauri et al., 2015)—but which persons in particular will be affected by drought, heat-related deaths, hurricanes, increased infectious disease, flooding, and famine remains extraordinarily difficult to identify. Similarly, a factory that incinerates an extra 15 tons of hazardous air pollutants may well cause someone’s painful and lingering death from cancer—but whose cancer is impossible to predict ahead of time, and even afterward may be extraordinarily difficult to trace.

This research suggests that increasing the identifiability of environmental “victims” may help in raising concern about environmental harms. Perhaps people would be more willing to refrain from flushing expired prescription medicines down the toilet when it might lead to an antibiotic resistant staph infection in a 6-year-old girl named Lucy who lives in Anaheim than when it might lead to .01% of the population of Anaheim falling ill from antibiotic resistant staph infections. Similarly, news stories that highlight particular families whose homes will be lost to rising sea levels may evoke significantly greater care than mere information about the widespread harms that sea level rise is likely to cause. Importantly and counterintuitively, such communications may even be more effective when not bundled with information about the scope of the problem; such communications, as with the study on famine in Africa, may risk triggering psychic numbing (Small et al., 2007).

Interestingly, while individual identifiability increases willingness to engage in prosocial behaviors, it also increases a willingness to engage in punitive behaviors—the identifiable perpetrator effect (Small & Loewenstein, 2005). This effect, too, has relevance to the psychology of environmental law. Legislators may be more willing to support strong penalties for polluting engaged in by specific, identifiable companies than they would be for polluting engaged in by American industry more generally. Presumably, identifiability is also a matter of degree. Support for penalties for polluting by “coal companies” would fall somewhere in between.