A Path Appears by Nicholas D. Kristof Sheryl WuDunn

Author:Nicholas D. Kristof,Sheryl WuDunn [Kristof, Nicholas D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-385-34992-5
Publisher: Random House Inc.
Published: 2014-09-22T16:00:00+00:00

Mullaney intrigued us because he seemed so successful at the art of emotionally connecting Americans to distant suffering—a challenge that frustrated and eluded us. During the genocide in Darfur, Nick traveled through massacre sites, talked to a woman who had survived being set on fire because of the tribe she belonged to, and interviewed a man whose eyes had been gouged out with a bayonet. Yet although Nick was seared by what he saw, he felt as if his columns were shrugged off by readers. Meanwhile, New Yorkers were galvanized by another moral outrage. A red-tailed hawk nicknamed Pale Male had been nesting in a luxury apartment building on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, beside Central Park, but the building managers tired of the bird droppings and dismantled the nest of Pale Male and his mate, Lola. New Yorkers could accept a faraway slaughter, but evicting two hawks was unacceptable: Bird lovers organized protests, reporters rushed to cover the story, and there was an outcry. The building managers eventually caved in, allowing the birds to return, and Pale Male became an international celebrity, the focus of a pop song and of two documentaries. We kept wondering: How is it that Nick can’t get people as riled up over genocide as they get over two homeless hawks?

That acute frustration led us to investigate why it is that people respond to some moral appeals and ignore others. One pioneering expert on this issue is Paul Slovic, a psychology professor at the University of Oregon. Together with Deborah Small of the University of Pennsylvania and George Loewenstein of Carnegie Mellon, Slovic conducted a series of experiments by raising funds for Save the Children using different strategies and carefully measuring the results. One approach was to offer a rational appeal emphasizing the scale of the global hunger crisis with a placard noting that “more than 11 million people in Ethiopia need immediate food assistance” and that “food shortages in Malawi are affecting more than 3 million children.” That failed. People did not connect to impersonal statistics. Another strategy was an emotional call to help one particular girl:

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