Humans are empathic creatures, capable of feeling the emotions of others. But in one of the many mysteries of being human, our compassion drops as the number of people impacted climbs. If our compassion were a line graph, the line would plateau and even begin to dip as the scale of need increased. Our ability to empathetically engage simply doesn’t scale. 

This psychological phenomenon is known as the “compassion collapse” or “compassion fade.” “People tend to feel and act less compassionately for multiple suffering victims than for a single suffering victim,” writes Dr. Daryl Cameron, director of the Empathy and Moral Psychology Lab at Penn State University. This goes against both common sense and humanitarian interests: shouldn’t we feel more compassion and be quicker to act as suffering increases? But we don’t. “Precisely when it seems to be needed the most,” adds Cameron, “compassion is felt the least.”

 Numb to the Numbers

What’s the explanation for this paradox? It turns out there are a few. The simplest is that humans are finite beings with limited resources. If we give everything we have to help others, at some point we’ll run out of our own resources. Another factor is the belief that, at a certain scale of suffering, one individual’s action (or inaction) doesn’t make a difference. This leads us to decide, consciously or unconsciously, that it’s not worth feeling the pain of others if we can’t do anything to change their circumstances. 

A third reason is our limited capacity for empathy, says Dr. David DeSteno, a professor of psychology at Northeastern University who studies the mechanisms of the mind that shape vice and virtue. We have to feel empathy before we can take compassionate action on behalf of others. 

If our compassion—and therefore our empathetic feelings—were to scale with suffering, we’d be overwhelmed. In the face of widespread tragedy and need, it becomes crushing to take on the pain of others. We’ve all felt the numbness that follows binging on news about a wide-scale tragedy: a natural disaster, famine, a global pandemic. What, after all, can one person do in the face of such large-scale pain? 

This sense of helplessness means that people are more likely to donate time and money to causes focused on individuals. Nonprofit communicators have long understood the power of a single story; giving campaigns focused on individuals reliably perform better than those focused on groups. Studies conducted in 2014 by researchers from the University of Oregon found that a charity campaign focused on multiple hungry children prompted 12 percent less giving than a campaign focused on one child.

Our inability to process large-scale suffering has also prompted organizations to turn to visual depictions of suffering as a way to make large numbers comprehensible. During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, The New York Times published an image of a rectangle comprising five hundred thousand dots on its front page—each dot standing for a life lost to the virus. Social psychologist Emily Balcetis writes that “this kind of visual aggregation tactic … effectively fights compassion fade.” Visually aggregating the number of people impacted by tragedy also works for charitable giving campaigns. In a study that used images showing Syrian children individually and grouped together, Balcetis writes that visually “depicting the victims as a single unit raised concern and assistance.”

Why It Matters to Believe Small Acts Matter

Not everyone experiences the compassion collapse, however. Along with researcher Daniel Lim, DeSteno conducted research that found people who had faced adversity tended to show more resilient compassion. Surveying those who had lost loved ones or faced economic hardship or experienced natural disaster, Lim and DeSteno discovered that their compassion could scale to match the number of people impacted. And this was true for any kind of adversity. “You might predict if I was a victim of a natural disaster, I would feel more compassionately for someone who was a victim of a natural disaster, but maybe not for someone who was living under economic hardship. Turns out, it doesn’t matter,” says DeSteno. Any time of adversity predicts greater compassion for others, regardless of their particular struggle.

Through a series of studies, Lim and DeSteno identified two factors that made these people more compassion-resilient. First, they believe that small steps matter. They’re less likely to succumb to apathy, and more likely to believe their actions can be efficacious—likely because they themselves have been the recipient of others’ compassion and seen firsthand the impact of small, compassionate acts. Additionally, those with prior adverse experiences were more likely to feel anticipatory guilt. In other words, they predicted they would feel more guilty if they didn’t take action to help others than those who hadn’t experienced hardship. People who’ve lived through tragedy feel more responsible for relieving the suffering of others—either because someone else relieved their suffering, or because someone didn’t, and they experienced firsthand the absence of support.

Is it possible to build more resilient compassion, even for those who haven’t suffered personally? Lim and DeSteno found that certain interventions did stop compassion from fading. The most effective involved convincing people that their actions mattered, and that the steps they took toward helping others were efficacious. When researchers presented study participants with an empathy task—such as donating to victims of civil war in Darfur—and convinced participants that their actions would make a tangible difference, the compassion fade effect disappeared. The more someone believed that they could help others, the more resistant they were to the compassion collapse. 

These results have public implications. If organizations can convince people—whether through media campaigns, speaker series, storytelling initiatives, or volunteer engagement— that their involvement makes a difference, they can bolster compassion from collapsing in the face of large-scale suffering. Stopping the compassion fade means persuading would-be volunteers and donors that even their small acts lead to a better outcome.

On an individual level, contemplative practices like meditation can also help. Data shows that when people engage in practices like meditation, it increases their compassion, explains DeSteno. And just as these practices build our capacity for compassion, he suspects they would also make our compassion more resistant to collapse—in part because meditation and other contemplative practices expand our capacity to sit with discomfort. “When we’re feeling overwhelmed by the pain of other people, we shut it down and we turn away from it. So anything that can actually make us willing not run from those negative, hurtful feelings, but to sit with them and then engage with them and move forward, should help us overcome [the compassion collapse].”

He adds, “You’re only going to want to exert effort if you believe that there’s some chance it’s going to lead to something. Part of that is the ability to not look away in the first place, and the second part is to believe that you have some efficacy.”

Annelise Jolley is a journalist and essayist who writes about place, food, ecology, and faith for outlets such as National Geographic, The Atavist, The Rumpus, and The Millions. Find her at annelisejolley.com.

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