You're a good person, right? Don't answer that if you don't want to; I'm not here to humiliate you, we can just take it as a given. We're all cool here. But you pay your taxes, only rarely worship false idols, and have never driven over someone for taking too long in a crosswalk. Basically, you care about others. Maybe you don't act on your cares -- doing good things is hard, and makes you sweaty -- but you care enough to want other people to do good things in your place.

But because you're a delightful bundle of contradictions, you decide what to care about for often the most illogical of reasons. To illustrate this, let me ask you a question. What's worse: A person -- let's say someone you don't know, someone far away -- dying in a car accident? Or is it a hundred people, also ones you don't know, dying in another car accident?

The second car would have been bigger, I guess.

This isn't a trick question. The answer is that it's the second one. Whether you get out a slide rule or just use common fucking sense, a hundred people dying is worse. And yet there's a very good chance that when you learn about these tragedies on television or from one of the ravens which brings you news, you will care far more about the smaller tragedy, the one where only one person died.

Thanks to a phenomena called psychic numbing, as the scale of a tragedy becomes larger, we care about it less. Part of this is simply distance. If you hear about a genocide, it's likely far away from you, impacting people you don't personally know. And because it's harder to think of those people as actual people, you care less about them as a result. But that doesn't explain all of it. You might recall scraps of news where you cared quite a bit about someone you didn't personally know. And not just a celebrity who gives you pants-feelings. You found yourself abruptly caring about a normal, some regular person struck by tragedy.

The reason for this is that when you hear about a tragedy affecting an individual, you often also learn about that person's life, maybe enough to spot similarities with your own. "That could happen to me!" you say, because everything has to be about you, and as a result, you care more. Maybe even enough to act, to help the person or prevent the same tragedy from happening to anyone else, especially if that anyone else is someone who looks like you. There's not a lot of conscious though in this; you see a person suffering, and without rationally processing anything, you care, and your brain later comes up with reasons you want to help.

But when you hear about a lot of people dying, you'll rarely learn enough details of their lives to connect with any of them as people. You might just hear the number of victims, or number of limbs missing, or some other statistic which is harder to forge an emotional connection with. That instinctive, emotional reaction to seeing another human suffer doesn't switch on, so your brain is just left with its plodding, rational toolkit. And for a big problem which looks insurmountable, the brain concludes nothing consequential can be done and sends you in search of the salty snacks which give you such comfort.

Crazily, that valuable empathetic reaction to seeing an individual suffer can apparently be shut down even by seeing a statistic. In one study, participants were divided up into three groups and asked to donate money to a specific cause. One group was presented with details on a specific starving kid, the second group was presented with statistics about a whole bunch of starving kids, and a third was told about the specific kid, but also got the statistical stuff about the bigger picture. People donated more to save the specific kid, as you'd expect. But the third group, the ones told about the kid and the bigger picture, gave less. Simply learning that more people were suffering made them care less. Other studies have suggested this effect occurs as soon as we're asked to consider more than one person in need. The human brain evidently has a powerful desire to help one individual life. More than one? "Fuck em," says the brain. It's the reason we can lose a whole news day to the fucking balloon boy, but still muster little more than shrugs when we talk about genocide in the Sudan or refugees in Bangladesh.