insensitive to mass suffering?

You know how people can be moved to tears by the tragic story of one person (like 9 year-old Christina Taylor Green) and at the same time seem utterly indifferent to the suffering of hundreds (say, the 663 killed by mudslides in Brazil a week later).

It turns out we may be as paradoxically emotional and callous as we seem.

Psychologists Daryl Cameron and Keith Payne guessed that what's going on is that, in the face of overwhelming suffering that would otherwise move us to help, our self-preservation defenses kick in. They test their theory by looking at the responses of test subjects when they are exposed to mass suffering; when the participants are lead to believe that they will be asked for money, their emotional responses drop (compared to a group where donations were not brought up).

It's as if our empathetic selves are at odds with our self-preservation selves. From an evolutionary standpoint, that makes a lot of sense. Having empathy for one or two suffering people may pay off in the long run; you help them out today and they - or their friends - help you out in the future. But having empathy for hundreds of sufferers would become a full-time job - leaving you no time to fetch roots and berries for you and your kids. You and your DNA would be gone before you could reap any of the returns.

Nature equipped us with empathy, but made sure we weren't all Mother Theresa's.