Head, Heart, and Compassion
The idea that there is some sort of split between “head” and “heart” is very old, dating back at least to the ancient Greeks. But does this distinction really exist? Does each human really possess two different methods of seeing the world and making choices? Recent psychological research suggests that this is indeed the case.
It has been known for some time that people will donate more money to individuals in need than groups. This has been demonstrated by, for example, asking for money for a single famine victim in Africa, naming her and showing a photograph (”this is Rokia and she is severely malnourished”) versus giving statistics about the huge scale of the famine as a whole (”millions of people are starving.”) People will consistently give more money when presented with an “identifiable victim”, often double the amount given to “statistical victims” or more.
This doesn’t really make sense, and it doesn’t necessarily correspond to the best choice for society as a whole. Deborah A. Small, George Loewenstein, and Paul Slovic summarize this problem in a recent paper:
Debiasing the discrepancy in giving is important because concentrating large sums of money on a single victim is inefficient. In many cases, society would be better off, if resources were spread among victims such that each additional dollar is spent where it will do the most good. Yet, when making a decision to donate money toward a cause, most people probably do not calculate the expected benefit of their donation. Rather, choices are made intuitively, based on spontaneous affective reactions.
Posing as fundraisers for Save The Children (to which all donations were ultimately forwarded), the authors of this study performed a number of interesting experiments. I will discuss two of them here. First, they asked for money for single malnourished child – an identifiable victim – but attempted to “debias” a randomly selected half of the subjects by including the following “intervention” text on the donation form:
We’d like to tell you about some research conducted by social scientists. This research shows that people typically react more strongly to specific people who have problems than to statistics about people with problems. For example, when ‘‘Baby Jessica’’ fell into a well in Texas in 1989, people sent over $700,000 for her rescue effort. Statistics—e.g., the thousands of children who will almost surely die in automobile accidents this coming ear—seldom evoke such strong reactions.
The experimenters discovered that people who had been informed in this way about the bias against statistics gave less than people who were not so informed. In fact, those who where exposed to the above intervention and then asked to donate to a single victim ended up giving the same lesser amount (about half as much) as those who were asked to donate on the basis of starvation statistics alone. In essence, it appears that telling people about the identifiable victim bias simply cancels out whatever affectual (emotional) response leads people to donate more money to an identifiable victim in the first place.
The other experiment went right to the core of the head vs. heart question. Again, half of the subjects were given an intervention, but this time the intervention had nothing to do with the psychology of donation. Instead, selected subjects were asked before donating to complete a “priming” task designed to induce analytical thinking. This consisted of a sheet with five questions requiring careful reasoning, such as “if an object travels at five feet per minute, then by your calculations how many feet will it travel in 360 seconds?”
The result? Subjects who had performed the priming task again gave less money, again less than half as much as subjects who were not primed. So it seems that what someone thinks about doesn’t matter; it is the action of analytical thinking itself that undermines their affective response:
In sum, our results demonstrate that sympathy for identifiable victims diminishes with deliberative thought, but remains consistently low for statistical victims. This pattern holds with various manipulations of deliberative thought, including explicit debiasing interventions, providing statistics, and priming an analytic mindset.
These findings support the more general notion that certain stimuli naturally evoke more affect than others and that cognitive deliberation can undermine outcomes that typically arise when choices are made affectively.
However, the fact that in this case the instinctual, emotional, affectual, “heart” response leads to greater sympathy should not be taken as general. Callousness and prejudice are also instinctual emotional responses; the heart is not naturally more compassionate than the head. Rather, in their discussion of the results, the authors note,
A more precise account of what is going on is that, in certain situations, affective responses to victims diverge from more deliberative responses. It is possible that deliberate thinking could sometimes lead to more charity. For example, contrary to the difference between statistical and identifiable victims, we often experience little visceral sympathy for needy victims who are from other countries or of a different race or socioeconomic status, but thinking about their plight may lead us to recognize their deservingness. In such instances, we conjecture, interventions that encourage deliberate thinking like those presented in the four studies just presented might lead to greater generosity rather than less.
Some support for this is evident in a study by Skitka, Mullen, Griffen, Hutchinson, and Chamberlin (2002). In this study, participants read about a number of individuals with AIDS who differed in how they contracted the disease. For each case, participants judged whether the individual was to blame for their situation and how deserving he/she was of subsidies for drug treatment. Half of the participants performed this task while under cognitive load, thereby reducing the ability for deliberate thinking. Under cognitive load, both self-described liberals and conservatives were less likely to provide subsidies to blameworthy than to non-blameworthy individuals. Conservatives followed the pattern without load, yet, liberals provided just as much assistance to blameworthy individuals as to non-blameworthy individuals. Thus, deliberative thinking increased generosity, at least for liberals.
I find it interesting that the cognitive differences between “liberals” and “conservatives” can be quantified in terms of this compassion gap, but the real point of all this research is that there really are two different decision-making modes in human psychology. The evidence suggests that “head” and “heart” do seem to exist, that they often provide different answers, and that neither one is universally more empathetic.
