Analysis Of If I Will Never Act Paul Slovic

Paul Slovic’s “‘If I look at the mass I will never act’: Psychic numbing and genocide” describes the lack of motivation that arises when people are given facts about mass tragedies. Genocide is the main problem that Slovic mentions, because it means the death of so many people. When mass casualties occur, statistics are usually utilized to describe the extent of the problems, but it is usually difficult for people to fully articulate the meaning behind these numbers. Slovic believes that human brains are badly designed to care about big problems such as genocide, because statistics usually are unable to motivate people to be upstanders rather than bystanders. As seen in the article, it is clear that statistics do not allow people to accurately understand the degree of severity of mass murder or other tragedies affecting many people. When genocide is mentioned in the news, the main way …show more content…
However, stating the number of deaths does not seem to have much of an effect on readers. It is difficult for humans to truly understand the amount of people being affected, since brains do not comprehend the exact distinction between large numbers. For example, if people read that two hundred thousand people have died, they will recognize that it is a large number, but how will they really grasp what the number actually means? In other words, would someone actually react differently to the death of two hundred thousand people compared to the death of four hundred thousand people? Although four hundred thousand is double the amount of two hundred thousand, readers viewing this statistic are unlikely to be two times more upset when seeing the higher number. Slovic referred to statistics that presented the