The Correlation of Proximity and Interest

Why is it that people care so much when a stranger near to them dies than when a million strangers on another continent die?

I mean, some high school kid drinks and crashes his car and the city is in mourning and the school is closed so everyone can attend his funeral. Some sociopath whacks his wife and it is national (neigh, international?) news for a year and a half. Hundreds of thousands of people are slaughtered, and no one bats an eyelash.

My theory behind all of this is that it is easier. So much easier to deal with one person killing another person, or a car crash, or whatever. There’s not much debate about it. It sucks to pretty much everyone. It has a simple and relatively painless solution. There is no need for action, no extra taxes, nothing complicated. There’s a trial and a funeral and everyone’s more or less moved on to the next commercial break.

To support this theory, I submit the following. Gang violence, especially in the 1980s-1990s in Los Angeles. Here you have proximity and interest correlation, but it is more like -0.2 than 1. However, people block out most of the deaths resulting from said violence because the issues involved are more complicated. It isn’t a -1 like Rwanda or DRC or Sudan or elsewhere, but it registers less than a suburb kid dying. So you have some caring because of proximity, and a good/bad factor - gangs are bad, their victims are good. Simple. You don’t have a Tutsi vs. Hutu factions and the incredibly complex situation that was there. But on the other hand, you have proximate causes of gangs, which disinterest people. They don’t want to hear about it.

I too wonder as to why so many flowers, toys, and other expressions of sympathy are left at make shift shrines. e.g. the Murrow bldg. in OK. Very many more items that could possibly be associated with relatives of the victims.
A similar problem is the whole school requiring greif counselling when one student is killed in a car crash following a ball game.
Seems to me that the attention given by the media is a factor.
Perhaps a sociologist will sort it all out for us.

Is this really that surprising? Sounds like normal human nature to me. It’s harder to feel personally affected by something happening across the world. I think you’re also overstating your case in a big way if you’re saying “nobody bats an eyelash.” As far as the media goes, proximity is one of the key factors in deciding what to cover because it’s understood that people are more interested and more affected by things that happen near them.

[paraphrase of D. Hume]Sympathy is a commodity and a limited one at that. It tends to decrease with distance (inverse square law? I’m pretty sure Hume never tried to be that precise). Universal human nature. Your daughter fails eleventh grade=Neighbor’s wife dies=twenty people across town die=1,500 people in Darfur die (unless you’re a Darufurian.[/paraphrase of D. Hume]

I’ll find a cite later.