After some intense google searching and book skimming I came up short trying to identify the source of the following idea which I vaguely remember. It goes something like this:
“If the average person (in America) woke up tomorrow and learned that the entire population of China was destroyed, they would probably reflect on it for a few minutes / think “how horrible”, and then go on with their day / have lunch as if nothing happened.”
I believe this is supposed to demonstrate something about humans’ innate lack of compassion for distant outsiders, and may have been explicitly contrasted with what the average person’s reaction would be if someone close to them died.
Does this ring a bell for anyone? I’m really frustrated with my failure to track down the source and would appreciate any leads.
One is something called “12 monkey theory” or 14 or something like that. The theory states that we can only form social networks with about 14 people at a time, and that we are unable to emphasize with larger numbers. For example, a family of 4 dying in a car accident affects us more emotionally then 120,000 dying in an earthquake, because we just can’t emotionally connect with that number of people. Another classic example was that Cuban boy, Elian Gonzales, who captured headlines across the country for a year, but the hundreds of thousands of other abducted children in nearly identical situations are virtually ignored.
Another theory is a sub-theory within the idea of journalism, about the criteria of what makes something “newsworthy.” One of the criteria is location, in that events that happen closer to wherever we are living at the moment are more interesting to us. For example, if there was an earthquake in some remote country we’ve never heard of, we might not even read the story. But, if there’s a fire truck outside our house, we might go out and see what’s happening.
I don’t know the source of that thought experiment, but I will note that a thought experiment isn’t particularly necessary. Consider the tsunami resulting from the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake: 200K-300K dead or missing, over a million left homeless. Far less than 1.3 billion souls, but it was the single largest acute loss of life in nearly 40 years. Considering the amount of public and private charity that flowed into the area after the waters receded, I don’t think “they would probably reflect on it for a few minutes / think “how horrible”, and then go on with their day / have lunch as if nothing happened” is an accurate characterization of the average outsider’s response.
To narrow down an earlier poster’s guess, the term is monkeysphere. It’s the idea that our primate brains are only really capable of emotionally connecting with beings in our own little spheres of existence (which need not necessarily be geographical).