"Psychic numbing" is a term originally coined by Robert Jay Lifton in 1967 to describe the suspension of feeling that enabled rescue workers to function during the aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing.
More recently, it has been used by the psychologist Paul Slovic to describe the phenomenon that allows people to care about the plight of an individual but become indifferent when the plight affects many people.[1]
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The term "psychic numbing" was originally used by Robert J. Lifton to refer to a detachment from emotion during traumatic situations:
I came upon the idea of what I call "psychic numbing," at first I called it "psychic closing off," in trying to understand what Hiroshima survivors were describing to me. They would say such things as, "the bomb fell" — or they would describe the experience they had: "I saw this array of dead and dying people around me. And I saw everything, but suddenly I simply ceased to feel anything." Some used the metaphor of a photographic plate that was overexposed. It was as though the mind was shut off. And I came to call that psychic numbing.
He also applied the term to everyday occurrences; a sort of selection between different influences:
...I began to wonder not just about those who were exposed to the atomic bomb, [but] what about those who make, not just atomic but nuclear weapons, hydrogen bombs? And I thought about the psychic numbing involved in strategic projections of using hydrogen bombs or nuclear weapons of any kind. And I also thought about ways in which all of us undergo what could be called the numbing of everyday life. That is, we are bombarded by all kinds of images and influences and we have to fend some of them off if we're to take in any of them, or to carry through just our ordinary day's work, or really deepen whatever we have to do or say.[2]
In "America in Vietnam — The Circle of Deception", Lifton compares psychic numbing to desensitization.[3]
Paul Slovic, in a 2007 study, uses the term "psychic numbing" in the context of genocide (also using the term "genocide neglect"):
Most people are caring and will exert great effort to rescue "the one" whose needy plight comes to their attention. These same good people, however, often become numbly indifferent to the plight of "the one" who is "one of many" in a much greater problem.
Assuming the value of each human life is equal, the value of saving lives should increase linearly with the number of lives in question. Another model suggests that large losses of life are disproportionally more destructive than smaller ones, since they threaten the viability of a society.
However, according to the study, the way humans value lives is more similar to a logarithmic function; as the number of lives to be saved increases, the changes in response with each additional life decrease.[1]
Sam Harris uses this effect as an example of a situation where human moral intuition fails in his book The Moral Landscape.[4]
Research on psychic numbing has suggested that people who become desensitized to suffering may be more adept in dealing with an upsetting or dangerous situation.
In a 2010 study, Taiwanese and American researchers took brain-wave readings from participants as they watched body parts be pricked with a pin, or dabbed with a cotton swab. Half of the subjects were physicians, the other half a control group. The control group showed clear differences in their reactions to the pinprick and the swab. The physicians, with experience managing sickness and pain, did not. The authors of the study theorized that the physicians' "down-regulation of the pain response dampens their negative arousal in response to the pain of others and thus may have many beneficial consequences including freeing up cognitive resources necessary for being of assistance."[5]