Business decisions made in corporate headquarters can have impacts in far flung places elsewhere in the world. CEOs and senior leaders rarely encounter the types of people their business decisions can impact (e.g. on the most vulnerable workers in their supply chains or community members around their operations). This distance can be a barrier to meaningful corporate commitment, resource allocation and changes to business practice.
This blog will focus on three insights from behavioural science that can help to address this challenge: (1) psychic numbing; (2) the identifiable victim effect; and (3) building empathy with identifiable beneficiaries.
There is a tendency to assume that corporate decision-makers are logical beings influenced by facts, data and statistics, much like the ‘homo economicus’ disproved by the behavioural economics revolution. Change makers regularly comment on how telling stories is perceived as “wishy washy” and that leaders need cold hard stats on the problem and how they can contribute to tackling the issue/s. But is this true? And what can we learn from behavioural science about how to most effectively motivate action?
Why are we sometimes indifferent to suffering?
Psychic numbing is a well-documented psychological oddity where we become insensitive to suffering as victims increase in number. This irrational phenomena has been documented extensively by Paul Slovic, particularly regarding inaction in situations of mass murder and genocide. The depressing reality is that:
“the more lives that are at stake, the less valuable an individual life seems. The act of thinking about large-scale numbers of people suffering seems to reduce the strength of the emotional reaction we have. The experience of feeling overwhelmed by the scale of a tragedy then seems to reduce our willingness to donate or act. We feel helpless. So we do less, or even nothing. We lack what’s called agency”[1]
It’s easy to see how in a responsible business context, this might mean that our descriptions of the 20-40 million people in forced labour or modern slavery, 75 million children performing dangerous work, or even the 1,100 victims of the Rana Plaza factory collapse, are not enough to inspire action.
The important insight from social psychology is that while we aren’t good at imagining or relating to large numbers of people, we are really good at thinking and caring about individuals[2]. This is why Mother Theresa said “if I look at the many I will never act. If I look at the one, I will”
Why are we motivated by identifiable victims?
The counter-concept to psychic numbing is the ‘identifiable victim effect’. This is the idea that we relate more to individuals than groups of people. Focusing on an individual’s needs evokes emotions that can spur action in ways that statistics cannot conjure.
In recent years, this has played out in the popular consciousness. The single image of a dead Syrian toddler on the beach in the Mediterranean had an outsized impact that the numerous stories of hundreds of migrants dying through dangerous journeys to Europe just couldn’t convey.. “it took a tiny boy on a beach to really bring home to those readers who may not yet have grasped the magnitude of the migrant crisis”[3].
This is why charities often focus on an individual child or person’s backstory. Studies show that this motivates us to help individual victims with charitable donations, but that our compassion towards victims decreases when:
the number of individuals in need of aid increases
identifiability of the victims decreases and/or
the proportion of victims helped declines[4].
One study showed that participants’ were less willing to help two children than they were to help one child[5].
How can we build empathy and identifiable beneficiaries?
An important aspect of these phenomena is that we are motivated by seeing identifiable beneficiaries of our efforts. An Adam Grant study found large increases in the number of donations and the amount pledged when student fundraisers received a motivational talk from a beneficiary of their work. Their motivation was boosted by being able to understand what difference their work made, the long-term impacts of it and the positive benefits to those they helped. This insight could be better leveraged in a responsible business context to motivate colleagues who must act (e.g. in different departments or regions of the world).
Behavioural scientists have successfully built empathy between decision-makers and victims/beneficiaries experientially. In Change for Good[6], the authors describe three examples of how they inspired action:
A Scottish opera had high net worth supporters walk up several flights of stairs to the cheaper seats, where most had never been, to help them understand the need to make access easier for older patrons or those with disabilities
The Asthma Society asked non-asthma sufferers to breathe through a straw to understand how hard it is to cope with asthma
The British Film Institute gave supporters a piece of crumbling nitrate film with a clip from their favourite movie to show the impact of decay and the need for conservation
How is this relevant to responsible business?
Many of the timely, topical business and human rights issues are those that affect many millions of people such as modern slavery or privacy in the digital age. The issue of sexual harassment in workplaces (and beyond) had for many decades emphasised the scale of the issue through statistics, but the #metoo movement was a turning point, in part, because women shared their personal stories of harassment through their social networks online, showing a personal face to the statistics and showing that we all know victims of sexual harassment.
These insights around psychic numbing, the identifiable victim effect and empathy are clearly relevant to the responsible business field. They help explain (in a non-judgmental way) why motivating action can be challenging, and they provide helpful insights on how to overcome apathy and inspire action. This could operate on two levels:
One, securing commitments and resources to prevent and mitigate adverse impacts on people by emphasising clear identifiable victims and telling their stories; and
Two, in terms of enabling greater access to remedy for victims of corporate harm.
In the remedial sphere, there are significant and serious obstacles to victims receiving remedy for harms, but perhaps psychic numbing plays some small part in the challenge. In an exchange with John Sherman, General Counsel and Senior Advisor to Shift and Senior Program Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Center for Corporate Responsibility, he remarked that “lawyers collectively have commoditized each type of bodily injury with a specific dollar amount; this much for a death, that much for an arm, etc. Depersonalization of the victim makes negotiating settlements much easier.” Telling their stories and showing the human face of adverse impacts may lead to less adversarial, and more humane, discussions around remedy when things go wrong.
Moving forward
I see a few areas where we could test the relevance of these phenomena in the responsible business space:
First, can we test whether these insights hold true in our field. Are CEOs and senior leaders more influenced by stories than statistics? How does this influence, for example, budget and resource allocation to prevent and mitigate impacts?
Second, how can we build empathy and connections between decision-makers and affected people? Does exposure to affected people - for example through reading case studies about their lives, through virtual reality technologies, or by meeting affected people in-person – change or influence the decisions that get made at corporate headquarters? How can we put senior leaders in the shoes of affected people?
Third, can we track back to understand whether companies emerging from a major crisis are spurred on to improve their practices and behaviours afterwards as a result of seeing the human face of their malfeasance?
Fourth, how does exposing companies and corporate lawyers to the victims of corporate misdeeds affect the provision of greater remedy or financial compensation?
These ideas could be tested in laboratory and/or real-world settings and would help us better understand how to deploy these insights and the extent of these effects. I’m also keen to hear whether these insights resonate and your experiences of what works when trying to galvanise action. Let me know at katrynwright[at]googlemail.com
[1] B. Ross and O. Mahmoud (2018) ‘Change for Good: Using Behavioural Economics for a Better World’, p.158
[2] B. Resnick (2018), ‘Why it’s so hard to get people to care about mass suffering’, Vox
[3] B. Ross and O. Mahmoud (2018) ‘Change for Good: Using Behavioural Economics for a Better World’, p.252
[4] Västfjäll D, Slovic P, Mayorga M, Peters E (2014) Compassion Fade: Affect and Charity Are Greatest for a Single Child in Need. PLoS ONE 9(6) p.2
[5] Västfjäll D, Slovic P, Mayorga M, Peters E (2014) Compassion Fade: Affect and Charity Are Greatest for a Single Child in Need. PLoS ONE 9(6) p.2
[6] B. Ross and O. Mahmoud (2018) ‘Change for Good: Using Behavioural Economics for a Better World’, p.261